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ENGLISH AND AMERICAN 
PHILOSOPHY SINCE 1800 



By 
ARTHUR K. ROGERS 



Student's History of Philosophy 
The Religious Conception of the World 
Brief Introduction to Modern Philosophy 
Essays in Critical Realism (in collabora- 
tion with six others) 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN 
PHILOSOPHY SINCE 1800 

A CRITICAL SURVEY 



BY 

ARTHUR KENYON ROGERS 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1922 

All rights reserved 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 






Copyright, 1922, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and printed. Published May, 1922. 



§)C!,A674027 



Press of 

J, J. Little & Ives Company 

New York. U. S. A. 



MAY 10 1922 



PREFACE 

In making an attempt to estimate the philosophical ideas 
of the last century and a quarter, I have endeavored as a his- 
torian to be accurate, and as impartial as nature will permit 
a philosopher to be when dealing with opinions more or less 
out of harmony with his own. But it may prevent misleading 
anticipations if I confess at the start that the tracing of his- 
torical affiliations and historical causes has had only a second- 
ary interest for me, and that the book as a whole is frankly 
propaganda, and designed to recommend one particular atti- 
tude as against competing attitudes; apart from this critical 
interest, it is not very likely that the work would have been car- 
ried through. If it were urged that fewer pages of criticism, and 
more attention to historical and descriptive data, would have 
resulted in a more generally useful volume, I do not know 
that I should be prepared to combat the claim; though I think 
it might be argued that one way, and at times the only way, 
to give an intelligible account of a philosophical doctrine, es- 
pecially of the more esoteric sort, is by pointing out its limita- 
tions and obscurities. My real excuse however for writing a 
book in which criticism plays so large a part is that I wanted 
to do so. 

The particular philosophical standpoint which the following 
pages presuppose as a background, is one which, I am regret- 
fully aware, many philosophers, perhaps most of them, will 
regard as lamentably crude and unadventurous. Typically 
two conceptions have been predominant in the history of 
thought — the psychological, and the logical. For the one, 
reality is to be interpreted as experience, beyond which the 
philosopher should not attempt to pry, "experience" stand- 



vi Preface 

ing for the actual stuff of human living, to the exclusion of 
any more ultimate or "metaphysical" source in the nature of 
things. For the other, the traditional demands of the dia- 
lectician are supreme, with the result that reality itself tends 
to turn into a system of logical relations such as will satisfy 
these demands. As against both these ideals of method, I 
have assumed constantly that the business of philosophy is 
to clarify and to bring into harmony, but also in the end to 
justify substantially, the fundamental beliefs that are implicated 
in our normal human interests; and that this reference to the 
needs of living, in a wide and generous interpretation, furnishes 
the touchstone by which alone the sanity of philosophical rea- 
sonings and conclusions can be tested. And put to such a 
test, both empiricism and rationalism, in their more technical 
sense, seem to me to stand condemned. While philosophy 
aims of course at logical consistency, thought, or logic, is an 
instrument, and not the constitutive stuff out of which the 
world is made; and even as an instrument its conclusions, in 
the hands of human thinkers, are too fallible and precarious 
to be safely substituted for the convictions by which human 
life and human values are sustained. Empiricism, on the other 
hand, in spite of its laudable insistence on translating meta- 
physical reality into homely concrete matter of fact, is clearly 
guilty of a paradox when it denies the right of anything to set 
up as a fact unless it be a part of some human experience- 
process. In assuming that belief, rather than experience, is the 
starting-point of our cognitive contact with the world, — or, if 
one prefers, that "experience" includes a reference to the nat- 
ural setting within which life goes on, as well as to the im- 
mediate facts of experiencing, — I conceive that I am really 
more empirical than the empiricists. Of course I know that 
the assumption will not approve itself to all philosophers. But 
if, as seems unavoidable, any fundamental criticism in phi- 
losophy must start with the acceptance of an attitude, or a 



Preface vii 

notion of what is reasonable and convincing, which is itself 
debatable, I do consider it an advantage when this attitude 
comes naturally to the human mind, and does not have to be 
induced by a special training in some school of metaphysics. 

I ought perhaps also to say that philosophy here, in line 
with the purpose I have just set forth, is taken in a some- 
what restricted sense, to the exclusion of certain matters which 
a history of philosophy might be expected to cover. For the 
most part I propose to deal only with those central and illumi- 
nating points of view which constitute a man's "philosophy" in 
the distinctive sense; and the special philosophical disciplines, 
accordingly, receive attention only as they have some pretty 
direct bearing upon this. There are, for example, technical 
developments in the realm of logic and scientific method, that 
many would rate as of large importance for the history of 
thought, of which no account in detail will be found in these 
pages. Even in the field of ethics, and of metaphysics itself, 
such technical problems as are separable from a comprehensive 
philosophic outlook are relatively neglected. 

After some hesitation, it has seemed to me best also to make 
no attempt to cover recent developments in philosophy which 
so far are confined to the pages of the philosophical journals. 
This does not indicate my opinion of their value; the last few 
years have seen an unusual amount of acute and original think- 
ing, some of which conceivably may bulk large in the immedi- 
ate future. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I. SCOTTISH REALISM 

rioa 
Section i. Reid. Thomas Brown 

I, Introduction i 

2-6. Thomas Reid 3 

7. Dugald Stewart 12 

8. Thomas Brown 13 

Section 2. Hamilton. Mansel. The Edinburgh 
Reviewers 
1-7. Sir William Hamilton 16 

8. Dean Mansel 29 

9. Francis Jeffrey 32 

10. Sydney Smith 33 

11. Sir James Mackintosh 34 

Section 3. Other Intuitionalists, Calderwood. 
Martineau. Ferrier 

1. The Scottish School 36 

2. Henry Calderwood 38 

3. James McCosh 39 

4. James Martineau 40 

5-7. James Ferrier 41 

CHAPTER II. THE UTILITARIANS 

Section i. Bentham. James Mill 

I. Introduction 49 

2-4. Jeremy Bentham 50 

5-11. James Mill 55 

ix 



X Contents 



PAQB 



Section 2. John Stuart Mill 64 

Section 3. The Philosophical Radicals. Bain. 
Austin. J. F. Stephen. Sidgwick 

1. George Grote 86 

2. Alexander Bain 87 

3. John Austin 91 

4. J. F. Stephen 92 

5. Henry Sidgwick 93 

CHAPTER III. AUTHORITY AND REASON IN 
THEOLOGY 

Section i. Thomas Arnold. The Oxford Move- 
ment. Newman 

1. Richard Whately 96 

2. Thomas Arnold 97 

3. The Oxford Movement 100 

4-9. John Henry Newman ....... loi 

10. W. G. Ward 109 

Section 2. Liberalism in Theology. Coleridge. 
Maurice. Matthev^^ Arnold 

I. Wordsworth no 

2-3. Coleridge in 

4. F. D. Maurice 116 



9 
10 



Chas. Kingsley .120 

J. R. Seeley 121 

Benjamin Jowett 122 

The Rationalists 123 

J. A. Froude 125 

Matthew Arnold 125 



CHAPTER IV. NATURALISM AND EVOLUTION 

Section i. Thomas Buckle. Darwin and Evolu- 
tion 



Contents xi 



PAGE 



I. Robert Owen. Thomas Buckle 128 

2-4. Darwin 131 

Section 2. Herbert Spencer 135 

Section 3. G. H. Lewes 166 

Section 4. Thomas Huxley 174 

Section 5. Other Representatives of Naturalism. 
Clifford. Naturalistic Ethics 

1. John Tyndall 184 

2. George Meredith. Grant Allen 184 

3. Henry Maudsley 185 

4. W. K. Clifford 186 

5. W. W. Reade 189 

6. The Positivists 189 

7. George Meredith 191 

8. Edith Simcox 193 

9. Leslie Stephen 194 

Section 6. Evolution and Religion. Browning 

1. Evolution and Theism 197 

2. John Fiske 198 

3. Joseph Le Conte 199 

4. G. J. Romanes 199 

5. The Duke of Argyle. Henry Drummond . . 200 

6. Benjamin Kidd 201 

7-9. Browning 202 

CHAPTER V. ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 

Section i. Transcendentalism in Literature. Car- 
lyle. Emerson 

I. Introduction 207 

2-4. Carlyle 208 

5-8. Emerson 213 



xii. Contents 



PAGE 



Section 2. T. H. Green 

I. Hutchinson Stirling 220 

2-17. T. H. Green 220 

18. John and Edward Caird 248 

Section 3, F. H. Bradley 250 

Section 4. Bernard Bosanquet 264 

Section 5. Josiah Royce 283 

Section 6. The Idealistic School. MgTaggart. 
HowisoN. Hocking. Laurie, Seth 
Pringle-Pattison 

1. English Idealists 297 

2. American Idealists 298 

3. H. H. Joachim 299 

4. J. M. E. McTaggart 300 

5. G. H, Howison 303 

6. W. E. Hocking 304 

7. S. S. Laurie 307 

8. Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison 309 

CHAPTER VI. PERSONAL IDEALISM, PAN- 
PSYCHISM, AND REALISM 

Section i. Personality and Religion. Personal 
Idealism 

1. Introduction 315 

2. Tennyson 317 

3. A. C. Eraser 319 

4. A. J. Balfour 320 

5. W. R. Sorley. Personal Idealism . . . . 322 

6. 'John Grote 323 

7. Theism 324 

Section 2. Panpsychism 

I. Introduction 325 



Contents xiii 

PAGE 

2. Samuel Butler 326 

3. James Hinton 326 

4. Carveth Read 327 

5-9. James Ward 328 

10-13. C. A. Strong 335 

Section 3. Realism. Hodgson. Hobhouse. San- 

TAYANA 

1. Epistemological Realism 339 

2, Physical Realism. Thomas Case .... 341 

3-5. Shadworth Hodgson 343 

6-7. L. T. Hobhouse 348 

8-11. George Santayana 351 

12. Robert Adamson 357 



CHAPTER Vn. PRAGMATISM 

Section i. Peirce. Schiller 

1. Introduction 359 

2. C. S. Peirce 360 

3-6. F. C. S. Schiller 362 

Section 2. William James 368 

Section 3. John Dewey 388 

Section 4. Other Pragmatists. Pearson. Baldwin 

1. Other Pragmatists 406 

2. Karl Pearson 407 

3. J. M. Baldwin 409 

CHAPTER VIII. NEO-REALISM 

Section i. English Neo-realism. G. E. Moore 

1-2. Introduction 411 

3-6. G. E. Moore 413 



xiv Contents 



PAGE 



Section 2. S. Alexander 

1-5. S. Alexander 421 

6. Other Neo-realists 428 

Section 3. Bertrand Russell 429 

Section 4. American Neo-realism. Perry. Holt 

I . The New Realism 440 

2-3. R. B. Perry 441 

4. E. B. Holt 446 

5. E, G. Spaulding 448 

Section 5. Conclusion . . . ...... 449 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN 
PHILOSOPHY SINCE 1800 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN 
PHILOSOPHY SINCE 1800 



CHAPTER I 
SCOTTISH REALISM 

§ I. Reid. Thomas Brown 

I. The close of the eighteenth century in England was one 
of those recurrent periods when speculative curiosity about the 
bases of human existence and human belief seems almost to 
have vanished from the mind. It is only in the field of po- 
litical philosophy that genuine creative activity is visible; here 
indeed three names lend to the period real distinction. In 
William Godwin, a thin but acute intelligence, we find a sin- 
cere passion for liberty and equal justice that is still not unim- 
pressive, though it is turned into the somewhat shallow chan- 
nels of a rationalistic and individualistic logic which renders 
it an easy prey to the scornful. Quite at the opposite extreme 
from Godwin stands the powerful and florid personality of 
Burke, who was uttering noble truisms to prove that liberty 
is an overrated blessing, and that reforms are only justified 
when they involve no element of risk to men of property and 
breeding. Meanwhile Jeremy Bentham, engaged in trying to 
get an English ministry interested in the good work of re- 
forming law and building model prisons, was already beginning 
to suspect that something besides ignorance and inattention lies 
back of that lack of passionate regard for the greatest good of 



2 English and American Philosophy 

the greatest number which rulers sometimes display, and was 
laying the foundation for the hardheaded and non-Utopian 
radicalism about which cluster the most influential intellectual 
tendencies of the first half of the nineteenth century. But 
even Bentham, although there are to be found in him the roots 
of a comprehensive utilitarian philosophy that later becomes 
explicit in James Mill, has almost no interest in first principles 
except as they lend themselves directly to practical ends. 

Two opposing tendencies of thought were in possession of the 
field at the opening of the new century. Both of these had 
their center of gravity in an empirical observation of the 
human mind, and both were marked by a plodding patience of 
analysis rather than by any inspired sense for the vitalities of 
the human spirit. In a little group of literary men, influenced 
partly by their own genius, and in part also by the new Ger- 
man romanticism, a more humanistic attitude toward things 
of the mind was already making its appearance; but it was not 
till later that this came to have any wide influence on prevalent 
ways of thought. For the present, the few who took an in- 
terest in philosophy at all found themselves divided chiefly on 
the question of whether mental processes are to be explained by 
the laws of association at work upon the material of sense, or 
whether there is need to call in besides certain ultimate and un- 
explainable truths of intuition. The first tendency, to which 
the Utilitarian movement was presently to attach itself, had its 
chief prophet in David Hartley; and its most vigorous ex- 
ponent in the latter part of the century was the radical Uni- 
tarian minister Joseph Priestley. The other and opposing 
tendency goes back to the revolt of Thomas Reid against the 
sceptical idealism of Hume. It was this second school — of 
Scottish intuitionalism — which occupied the most commanding 
position at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Profess- 
ing as it did to stand as the champion of religion and morality 
against scepticism and materialism, it was naturally in better 
odor in academic circles, and for the time being it had an 



Thomas Rcid 3 

advantage also in the comparative talents of its defenders. It 
will be convenient, therefore, to take the so-called Scottish 
school as the starting point for the present exposition. And 
this will prove unintelligible without going back to Reid him- 
self, though Reid of course belongs wholly to the preceding 
century. 

2. Since the vogue of German Idealism, it has been com- 
monly assumed that all earlier forms of intuitionalism have 
been superseded once for all by the work of Kant and his suc- 
cessors. That the Scotch philosophers were far less subtle in 
their metaphysics is obviously true; but this is not in every 
way a disadvantage. Kant approached his problem under the 
sway of highly elaborated and technical prepossessions, and he 
felt compelled to shape his answer with these always in view. 
He was in much the same case as the liberal theologian who 
sets out to free religion from its dogmatism, but who feels at 
liberty to do so only by a revaluation of the accepted formu- 
lations of the past. In both instances the task might have 
been easier, and better done, if it had been approached in a 
simpler and more direct way. 

The exaltation of the part which underived and undebatable 
principles play in knowledge might easily lend itself, as later 
critics were fond of pointing out, to a readiness to accept as 
final whatever is familiar and congenial to the mind, and so to 
an illiberal conservatism in politics and religion. In calling 
itself the philosophy of Common Sense, the Scottish school did 
nothing to lessen this danger. Interpreted cautiously the 
phrase is not objectionable, even if it is not altogether felici- 
tous. The intuitionists wanted to repudiate merely reasoned 
or speculative conclusions, in favor of those first principles, 
shown ultimate and general in analysis, which we are under the 
necessity of taking for granted in the business of life without 
being able to give for them a logical proof. Judgments of 
"common sense," in addition to the fact of their general accept- 
ance and their importance for conduct, have also this char- 



4 English and American Philosophy . 

acter of sure immediacy. They go straight to the mark by a 
sort of quick intuitive decision, and in consequence may serve 
to supply a title for a philosophy which seeks to emphasize 
the fundamental and unreasoned foundations of belief. But 
if we grow a little careless, an appeal to common sense may 
well tend to encourage habits of mind that are scarcely to be 
approved. Instead of merely .standing for the endeavor to 
sift out what are in fact the simple underlying assumptions of 
experience in general, it may mean a slovenly habit of shirking 
difficult analysis, and accepting on their own terms the dicta 
of average uncritical opinion, using the common man's dislike 
of any strenuous exercise of the intellect to discredit the more 
exacting claims of philosophy. And in some of the lesser 
lights of the Scottish school such a tendency is indeed plainly 
in evidence. Reid himself, however, is open to criticism in 
nothing like the same degree. Reid is far from interpreting 
common sense in terms of a general plebiscite. "To the candid 
and discerning Few," he remarks, "I appeal as the only com- 
petent judges. If they disapprove, I am probably in the 
wrong, and shall be ready to change my opinion upon con- 
viction. If they approve, the Many will at last yield to their 
authority, as they always do." As a matter of fact Reid is 
putting his trust, not in the formulated opinions of mankind, 
but in those underlying assumptions "so necessary in the con- 
duct of life that a man cannot live and act according to the 
rules of common prudence without them," though these as- 
sumptions may have to wait upon careful philosophic analysis 
to get recognition and expression. What at bottom he is main- 
taining is, that life is more fundamental than reason or logic; 
that our most inexpugnable beliefs grow directly out of the 
needs of life, and are not grounded upon argument, because ar- 
guments are grounded upon them; and that when the case is 
so, we are only discrediting philosophy by the pretense that it 
is not so, and that conviction is to be made to wait upon 
reasoned demonstration. Belief, in a word, is prior to reason- 



Thomas Rcid 5 

ing, and supplies it with its necessary material; "I am per- 
suaded ±at the unjust live by faith as well as the just." In 
carrying out his program, Reid it is true leaves much to be de- 
sired. Frequently his analysis stops a good deal short of the 
needs of the case; and he does not always distinguish as clearly 
as he might the practical postulates of experience, from the 
traditional philosophical machinery of self-evident and non- 
contingent "truths of reason." His meaning, however, is 
sound; and in his demand that our reasonings should presup- 
pose and keep true to the practical assurances by which men 
live, he provides the only possible check against the aberra- 
tions of philosophy. 

3. Reid's own work centers about one problem in particu- 
lar — our knowledge of the external world. Originally an ad- 
herent of Berkeley's doctrine, the sceptical results to which this 
led in Hume had startled his common sense, and caused him to 
retrace his steps. The fundamental vice of the new "way of 
ideas" he thought himself to have discovered in its uncritical 
acceptance of a traditional philosophical opinion — that in 
knowledge there is need of some intermediary between the ob- 
ject and the perceiving mind. Locke's ideas, as Reid interprets 
them, are simply the remnants of the old and ungrounded 
theory of substantial images that pass into the mind, or the 
brain, from the things themselves. So far is it from being so, 
however, that we know directly nothing but ideas, that we do 
not know ideas at all, for the excellent reason that there are no 
such things. All that a true analysis reveals is the mental act, 
— the idea is not something on which this activity is per- 
formed, but, if it is anything at all, the activity itself, — and the 
real object. There is an original principle of the mind, to be 
accepted without explanation because it is already involved in 
all explanation, whereby there is attached to a sensation a be- 
lief in the present existence of the thing perceived, just as there 
is present in memory a belief in the past existence of the thing 
remembered. This belief is a simple act of the mind, which 



6 English and .lincrican FJiilosophy 

cannot be further analyzed or defined; we can give no reason 
for believing, other than the fact that this is the way our minds 
work. 

When one starts to scrutinize however Reid's position more 
in detail, it becomes apparent that it is not in every respect 
clearly conceived, and that it contains elements of unequal 
value. As against subjectivism, it is clearly in the right in 
maintaining that what anyone really believes himself to know 
is, not his own idea, but an independent object — in perception, 
the reality of an external world. Reid is successful in showing 
not only that this is the correct analysis of our actual con- 
viction, but that if we take a different starting point, and hold 
that to begin with we only know the mental, we shall end up 
also by knowing only the mental, and so land in practical 
scepticism. It seems clear that if nature — or, as Reid himself 
would put it, if God — had not taken things into its own hands, 
and provided us with a belief in the existence of the physical 
world more primitive than an uncertain inference from mental 
data, our chance of ever attaining it would have been pre- 
carious. When, however, we ask for a more exact account of 
the nature of the situation, difficulties and obscurities begin to 
creep in. One can perhaps best start from the point which is 
clearest, calling attention to complications as they arise. 

4. Now in connection with the so-called secondary qualities 
of matter, Reid's meaning is plain enough. It starts by em- 
phasizing the sharp distinction between sensation, and objec- 
tive quality. A sensation, say the smell of a rose, can be known 
to exist on occasion when an object acts upon the sense organ. 
But this sensation is not the thing we know in perception. 
What we perceive is "some power, quality or virtue in the 
rose"; the sensation is merely a sign which nature has consti- 
tuted with the capacity for calling up or suggesting the rose 
which produces the sensation. Furthermore for one who, like 
Reid, accepts unquestioningly the science of his day, it is just 
as certain that the sensation of smell is not like any quality in 



TJiomas Rcid 7 

the object, as that it is not the quality in the object. It is this 
fact on which the so-called "representative" theory of knowl- 
edge suffers shipwreck, since, if the sensation is not like the 
quality, it cannot represent it. In the case of secondary attri- 
butes, accordingly, the nature of "perception" is easily defined; 
the perception of an odor is the sensation of smell, plus the 
intuitive and unreasoned belief that an external cause exists 
which is producing it. 

The primary qualities, however, introduce a complication; 
for the difference between primary qualities and secondary, ac- 
cording to Reid, is just this, that the former involve the recog- 
nition, not merely of a cause, — in itself unknown, — but of a 
specific character attaching to this cause and constituting its 
nature. It is the distinction between an obscure and occult 
quality, and one of which we have a clear and distinct con- 
ception. And the question thereupon arises, whence comes this 
new and positive knowledge of objective qualities. Here also 
Reid's answer is plain up to a point; the quality is "suggested" 
to the mind, and a belief in it induced, by the appropriate sen- 
sation. This is to be sure suggestion of a rather special sort. 
Ordinarily when one thing suggests another, the two have both 
been in experience together before; in perception the fact is, 
rather, that a power acts by nature to bring about directly the 
appearance of new notions, conjure them up "by a natural kind 
of magic." Thus touch sensations suggest the new qualities of 
extension, solidity, and motion. In the case of visible figure, 
sensation is even dispensed with altogether, and the quality is 
suggested by the material impression on the nervous system 
merely. But now the important thing to notice is, that in any 
case, between the new quality and the sensation there is always 
a total difference. A pin has length, thickness, figure and 
weight; a sensation can have none of these characters. Ac- 
cordingly it follows once more that to perceive anything, it is 
not necessary' that we have some impression, sensation, or idea 
in our mind which is like it. There is no double object — one 



8 English and American Philosophy 

sun in the heavens and one in the mind. The sun we see is the 
real sun; we are so constituted by nature that the sensations 
we receive are the means of calling up immediately real quali- 
ties which, as we can make quite sure by bringing them into 
comparison, are no more like sensations than the toothache is 
like a triangle. I feel an object as hard. What happens is, 
that I have a feeling of touch which enables me to conclude, 
without any reasoning or comparing of ideas, that an external 
reality exists whose parts stick so closely together that they 
cannot be displaced without considerable force; and this latter 
character obviously has nothing in common with the touch sen- 
sation which suggests it. 

5. But now such a statement of the situation gives rise to 
more questions than seem to have occurred to Reid. Reid is so 
impressed by the difference between sensations like touch or 
smell, and the qualities recognized by science as belonging to 
matter, that he takes it for granted that nothing more is 
needed in order to establish the exclusively non-mental charac- 
ter of the latter; he fails to ask himself in what form then they 
do exist in so far as they are within the precincts of the know- 
ing mind. The very use of the word "suggestion" implies that 
we are operating after all with something in the nature of 
"ideas"; and the fact, if it be a fact, that a sensation has the 
power to call up a qualitatively new idea which is different 
from itself, need not of necessity prevent this from being a new 
idea, rather than a purely non-mental existence. All that Reid 
shows is, that it is not like certain other specified mental facts; 
he offers no proof that it may not equally in some sense be a 
part of our mental furniture. It would seem that what Reid 
vaguely had in mind could be translated into terms of rela- 
tions. Scientific knowledge is primarily relational in its con- 
tent, and Reid's description of primary qualities reduces in 
point of fact to relational terms; accordingly if we understand 
him as meaning that, through sense experience, we are led to 
recognize also relationships not themselves reducible to sensa- 



Thomas Reid g 

tional quality, we shall be able to satisfy most of the require- 
ments of his language. But even thus there would remain the 
same point to be settled: what is the mental status of these 
relations, since apparently they are, in knowledge, somehow 
present "in the mind" even though they belong also to the 
world which knowledge apprehends? 

In the absence of any explicit dealing with this question it is 
not easy to determine just what Reid's "realism" amounts to. 
At times his insistence that we know the object immediately 
seems to imply, as later on Hamilton tried to interpret it, that 
the object is literally present in perception in its own person, 
with nothing mental of any sort to mediate it. On the other 
hand, "natural suggestion" seems rather to point to the sup- 
posal that the immediacy of the object is only the immediate 
conviction of its actual existence, plus the presence of what 
must after all be called an "idea" of its qualities. Perhaps the 
best reason for supposing that Reid might, had he envisaged 
the problem more sharply, have found himself committed 
to the first of these interpretations, is supplied by his 
further theory of the nature of conception. At first sight, in- 
deed, when we turn to the knowledge of objects not at the 
moment open to perception, but absent in time or space, it 
seems less easy to dispense with an idea to mediate the knowl- 
edge; nor is there the same reason here for repudiating a "re- 
semblance" between the idea and the original perception. The 
denial of anything that can be called an idea in connection with 
thought, memory, or imagination is, however, a point on which 
Reid is explicit. It is true this denial loses something of its 
significance when we remember that Reid understands Locke 
and his followers to mean, that the image is a quasi-material 
efflux or emanation from the object, which equally with the 
object itself is separate from the mind, and whose only ad- 
vantage rests on the fact that it does not lie at a distance, but 
has got close up to or inside the brain. Had his attention not 
thus been directed to a misconception, he might not have found 



lo English and American Philosophy 

the belief in ideas so absurd. The fact remains however that 
he does persist in supposing that he has got rid of ideas in any 
sense, even as modifications of the mind itself. And in con- 
struing the situation without them, he shows a good deal of 
acuteness. The thought or idea of an object is to be inter- 
preted, he maintains, not as a duplication of the object, from 
which the object is then inferred, but as an act of the mind 
which issues directly on the object itself. Even in imagining 
an unreal object, there still is no question of an idea; in think- 
ing of a centaur, it is actually a centaur of which we think, and 
not the idea or image of one.^ And in some interpretation it 
would be difficult not to agree that this does indeed represent 
the fact. But because we are not thinking about the idea, 
it need not follow that no idea is there. And how an unreal 
object can be at all when it has no existence outside the mind, 
and there is no idea in any sense within the mind, Reid makes 
no effort to explain. 

6. But now if knowledge is, in thought and memory, suffi- 
ciently accounted for as a mental operation directed upon the 
object itself, it might be asked whether, in perception also, sen- 
sations do not occupy a somewhat anomolous place, as mental 
states intervening as "signs" between the mind's activity and 
the thing. And as a matter of fact two tendencies show them- 
selves here in Reid's discussions. When he is engaged in the 
actual introspective analysis of perception, he recognizes un- 
equivocally the mental existence of qualitative sense data. 
But a disposition is apparent also to pare the fact away, until 
some doubt remains as to just what after all is left.- In the 
first place, sensation is used continually as synonymous with 
feeling; and at times the border line between secondary quali- 
ties, and the quality of agreeableness or painfulness, seems 
practically to disappear. And now further, we are told, feeling 
is a "mental operation" again; at least it is so close to it that 

^Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay IV, Chap. II. 
^Cf. Essay I, Chap. I, 12. 



Thomas Rcid ii 

it is not worth while stopping to pick our terms. Reid has of 
course something to go on here; when we "feel a feeling," there 
is no object distinguished from the act in the sense in which a 
thing which we perceive is distinct from the perceiving. But 
if it be true that what is felt is inseparable from the act of 
feeling, this is itself a reason why the "operation" called feeling 
should be put on a different basis from the operation called 
knowing. An act which is identified with a definite bit of 
qualitative being, whether it be the quality of touch or odor, 
or only of pleasantness and pain, can continue to be called an 
"act" only after careful discrimination. To "feel a feeling" 
means indeed, merely, "to have a feeling," or "a feeling is 
there"; and this is just the mental existent, or Lockian idea, 
which Reid professes himself unable to discover. 

There is one sensation in particular where the ambiguities 
which attend Reid's doctrine are especially conspicuous — 
that of color. He has, in the first place, in order to maintain 
the thesis that there is no identity of character between sen- 
sations and objective qualities, to remove extensity from color 
sensation, since extensity is for him objective. And even in 
the case of bare color he has a difficulty to meet. It seems 
clear that the naive mind locates color as such — what Reid 
calls the "appearance of color" — actually in the object. But 
Reid cannot easily admit this. Since for him, with his scien- 
tific prepossessions, color is objective only as smell is objective, 
— as an unknown power capable of producing sensations in us, 
— and since to allow that nature creates a mistaken belief that 
apparent color is in the object would be to throw doubt upon 
an instinctive principle of common sense, he is forced to hold 
that we do not naturally tend to objectify color-quality; one 
gathers from Reid that men generally quite overlook the pe- 
culiar quality of color, as they do the sensational quality of 
touch, in their interest in those further objective properties of 
which it is a sign. To fortify this judgment Reid makes use 
of both of his expedients, and color is translated now into the 



12 Engllsli and American Philosophy 

"act of a percipient," and now into hedonic feeling. "It is not 
easy to persuade the vulgar that, in seeing a coloured body, 
when the light is not too strong nor the eye inflamed, they have 
any sensation or feeling at all" — this has not the least plausi- 
bility except as we reduce color-sensation to the mere feeling of 
painfulness.^ 

7. The most eminent of Reid's early disciples is Dugald 
Stewart, who occupied for a quarter of a century the chair of 
Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh to which he was elected in 
1785, and who won through the medium of his teaching a com- 
manding position among the intellectual lights of his day. 
Stewart had all the gifts that go to make up a successful college 
professor. With an attractive presence and a facile flow of 
language, he combined a suave and unaggressive personality, 
and a readiness to hold in abeyance whatever in his opinions 
was likely to give offence in powerful quarters, which enabled 
him to perform his duties with universal applause. His main 
influence however is in the way of popularizing philosophy 
rather than advancing it. This was his own professed interest 
in his academic work — to teach philosophy as a liberal and 
elegant discipline bearing on the "work and adornment of hu- 
man life" ; and his published lectures in consequence show only 
occasional lapses into rigorous metaphysical argument. For 
the most part he follows closely in Reid's footsteps, though 
with a number of minor changes, many of them improvements. 
Thus the conception of the "principles of common sense" is 
rendered rather more precise by Stewart; he prefers to call 
them Fundamental Laws of Human Belief, or Constituent Ele- 
ments of Human Reason. He thinks of them definitely, that 
is, not as "objects of knowledge," but as assumptions "neces- 
sarily and unconsciously involved in" the exercise of our 
faculties; not as principles or truths from which knowledge can 
be derived by way. of deduction, but as the "necessary con- 
ditions on which every step of the deduction tacitly proceeds." 

^Ibid., Essay II, Chap. XVIII. 



Dug aid Stewart 13 

Stewart makes one modification of Reid's doctrine of percep- 
tion, by drawing a distinction between the mere momentary 
existence of an objective quality while we are perceiving it, 
and its continued existence independent of our perception. It 
is only the first that is sufficiently accounted for by intuition; 
"independent" existence is the result of experience, due to the 
discovery that we cannot, as in the case of imagination, dismiss 
or recall the object as we please. 

8. It is to two younger contemporaries of Stewart that the 
significant developments of Reid's philosophy are due — 
Thomas Brou-n and Sir William Hamilton. Brown was a 
precocious young philosopher who already at the age of twenty 
had published a respectable criticism of Darwin's Zoonomia. 
Called upon to substitute for Dugald Stewart when the latter's 
health failed him, he filled this rather exacting position with 
remarkable success, and in 18 10 received the appointment to a 
professorship. Brown was perhaps handicapped by his own 
facility, especially when taken in connection with the fact that 
he had no first-rate contemporaries to set the pace for him; he 
seems very quickly to have felt that the last word had been 
said, and to have been indeed more solicitous of his reputation 
as a minor poet than as a philosopher. WTien published 
shortly after his death his Lectures attained a striking literary 
success, which proved as short-lived however as it was unusual. 

In its most general form, Brown's correction of Reid lay in 
the protest against a too liberal allowance of principles or facul- 
ties. Unquestionably Reid had been far too little critical in 
this respect; almost any fairly ultimate fact of human nature 
was permitted to become a candidate for his list. Thus there is 
a faculty that leads us to speak the truth, to confide in the ve- 
racity of others, to interpret facial expression, to accept consti- 
tuted authority; and there is of course to each distinguish- 
able psychological operation the allowance of a separate faculty 
■ — perception, imagination, conception, memory, and the like. 
Interpreted sympathetically there is an important element of 



14 English mid American Philosophy 

truth in Reid's contention which the associationists missed; he 
recognized, as they did not, the presence of that instinctive ele- 
ment in human nature which modem biology has placed on a 
firm footing. But he failed to separate instinct clearly in its 
distinctive character from the intellectual perception of 
"truths"; and instead of an organization of the field of instinct, 
which would have needed in any case a far more adequate 
understanding of its biological basis than was possible at the 
time, he left only a collection of heterogeneous facts. Brown 
however is in even less of a position than Reid to supply this 
lack; and in the process of removing the excrescences of the 
Scottish tradition, association encroaches so far upon intuition 
that it becomes doubtful whether Brown might not rather be 
classed as a member of the opposing school. 

Of the few intuitions which he still leaves standing, the 
most important is that of causation; though even here the 
situation is simplified. Reid, and after him Stewart, had 
held consistently enough that for scientific procedure causa- 
tion means no more than invariable succession; the scien- 
tist is engaged solely in formulating the laws of phenomena, 
though intuition enters as an instinctive belief in uniformity. 
But Reid also thought that there was another and metaphysical 
meaning to causality. The laws of nature are the rules of 
nature according to which the effects are produced; but there 
must also be a cause which operates according to these rules, 
an agent behind the scenes. This is a meaning important for 
philosophy even though it is not of any use in science; and it 
calls for a further original principle in the form of a self-evi- 
dent intuition that every effect in nature must have an efficient 
cause with power to produce it. Brown does away altogether 
with causality in this second sense; the notion of power, if it 
has any meaning at all, is no more than a recognition of the 
similarity of the future to the past. Even the creative activity 
of God, which reason informs us is unavoidably required to ex- 
plain the natural universe, is reducible to the need for be- 



Thomas Brown 15 

lieving that certain occurrences in God's mind are the invari- 
able antecedents of natural phenomena; there is no third cir- 
cumstance binding as it were the will of the Creator to the 
things which are to be. While however Brown agrees with 
Hume in reducing causation to uniformity, he rejects the sup>- 
position that the mere experiences of succession are enough to 
account for it. Rather, the belief in uniformity is inexplicable 
unless we suppose it brought to experience in the first place; 
"a stone has fallen a thousand times" differs as much from "will 
always fall," as does "a stone has fallen once." The invariable- 
ness is assumed, not inferred from preceding phenomena; 
unless we were so built as instinctively to expect the future to 
be similar to the past, the belief would never be generated in 
us by the mere observation of any number of successive events. 
A corresponding simplification shows in the treatment of 
Reid's theory of perception. Here Brown repudiates outright, 
to begin with, Reid's attack upon ideas or images, and calls at- 
tention to the way in which this is misdirected through taking 
too seriously what is meant only as a metaphor. An idea is. 
Brown maintains, not the emanation from an object imported 
into the brain, but a modification of the mind itself, a particular 
form of the mind's existence. Now it seems self-evident to 
Brown that neither Reid, nor any other self-respecting philoso- 
pher, could really mean that an object is present bodily in the 
mind. Nothing can be in the mind but a modification of the 
mind's own nature; and therefore such a mental modification 
is always the medium through which a knowledge of objects 
is effected. Accordingly a part of Reid's doctrine of per- 
ception disappears. Certain sensations are, so Stewart fol- 
lowing Reid had said, accompanied with an irresistible belief 
in the existence of certain quaHties of external objects. Brown 
drops the reference to "qualities," leaving as the testimony of 
our instinctive constitution merely the belief in an external 
sontethhig that produces the sensation; to be the object of 
perception is nothing more than to be the foreign cause or oc- 



1 6 English and American Philosophy 

casion on which this state of mind directly or indirectly arises. 
The situation which Reid had ascribed to secondary qualities is 
thus extended to all; even what we regard as extended or re- 
sisting is known to us only by the feelings occasioned in our 
minds. And in this way our perception of matter can be ex- 
plained without calling in any special "faculty"; it involves 
only a complex association of ideas, including in particular the 
muscular feeling of resistance, — one of Brown's chief titles to 
fame is his distinction of muscular feelings from those of 
touch, — which serve to suggest to the mind the notion of a 
cause not in the mind itself. Without this last addition, we 
should have passed from Scottish realism to associationism; 
and even with it we evidently have taken only a short step in 
the direction of Reid's desire to validate objective knowledge. 
The actual qualitative knowledge we can hope to get is only 
of the successive states or affections of the mind; apart from 
this we are left at best with "a something we know not what," 
as a permanent source of sensation. And even this seems 
jeopardized on a closer scrutiny. Not only does Brown insist 
that the sensations which mediate knowledge are subjective, 
and wholly unlike anything that is in the object itself; the same 
is, if anything, even more clearly true of relations, which are 
feelings that arise in the mind, not from an external source, but 
from its own independent constitution. It follows that time, 
then, which is one of the relations, has no objective reality.^ 
But in that case the notion of cause as well, which involves 
temporal succession, is purely mental; and it is natural to ask 
how any use of it can serve our purpose. 

§ 2. Hamilton. Mansel. The Edinburgh Reviewers 

1. On the whole, the most important name connected with 
the movement started by Reid is that of Sir William Hamilton, 
Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh from 1836 

^Philosophy of the Human Mind, Lectures V, XLI. 



Sir William Hamilton 17 

till his death in 1856. Hamilton won an enormous repu- 
tation on a comparatively slender basis of published writing, — 
in particular, a number of articles contributed to the Edinburgh 
Review, — partly through the influence which his vigorous per- 
sonality, aided by a portentous array of philosophical learning, 
made upon the academic world, but also through a real gift for 
abstract metaphysical speculation at a time when metaphysics 
in Great Britain seemed on the point of becoming extinct. 
Whether his talents were really of great service to the perma- 
nent cause of philosophy is another question. About his learn- 
ing there is no dispute, though it was of a sort held in more 
esteem in his own day than at the present time. Hamilton is 
most successful in combing philosophical literature for semi- 
linguistic data; and all philosophy tends for him to take the 
measure of the little group of problems and concepts agitated 
by the Scottish school. The actual influence of his arduous 
historical labor, in the absence of any adequate embodiment, 
rests mainly on the fact that he had read widely in the new 
German philosophy, though he never quite got the clue to it; 
and his reputation did something to make such knowledge re- 
spectable. On the side of his own more original speculations, 
it is again very doubtful whether he has contributed anything 
of lasting value to the history of thought; and there is even 
some reason to suspect that, all things considered, his influ- 
ence tended to encourage a sort of philosophizing that does the 
name of metaphysics no particular good. Hamilton's mind 
combines great subtlety with a defective sense for reality, and 
a lack even of first-rate logical clearheadedness; meanwhile he 
has built his philosophy about two terms — relativity, and con- 
sciousness — both of more than average ambiguity, and both 
certain to breed trouble unless one is prepared to exercise the 
most careful discrimination. 

2. The phrase "relativity of knowledge" is one which the 
instructed reader will approach with a sinking of the heart, for 
he knows that in it lie all sorts of possibilities for obscure and 



1 8 English and American Philosophy 

unprofitable logomachy. In its multiplicity of meanings Ham- 
ilton himself seems to revel ; and this makes it difficult to state 
his position without a certain amount of indirection. The 
doctrine that knowledge is relative goes back to Reid and his 
successors, where it has on the whole a pretty definite meaning; 
and with this meaning Hamilton also takes his start. It in- 
tends to assert, namely, that we can know only the qualities or 
modifications or modes of substance, and not substance itself. 
This, so long as we hold to the traditional notion of substance, 
is indeed self-evident. If substance is that in which qualities 
inhere, it is not itself a quality; and since anything that is held 
as a specific character before the mind is found to be a quality 
or a relation, substance as distinct from quality cannot be 
thought in terms of definite characteristics. It is merely the 
unknown answer to a logical demand. 

3. But now a second meaning also appears in the earlier 
philosophers, though it comes into prominence only in Hamil- 
ton's hands. This is to the effect that in becoming known 
through its qualities, an object is always relative to our human 
faculties. However, this is open to more than one interpreta- 
tion. The statement may have, and at times evidently does 
have, a purely verbal significance, from which no consequences 
flow that have the slightest philosophical importance. It tells 
us, in other words, that we cannot know anything unless we 
have the power to know it, and that there may be plenty of 
things in the world which we do not know through lack of the 
appropriate organ, as we should never suspect the existence of 
color were we born without eyes. But about the validity of the 
knowledge we do happen to possess this does not decide one 
way or the other; and it is the question of validity which in- 
terests the philosopher. 

There is however one particular fact in this connection which 
may be thought to bear upon the question of validity, and to 
lend itself to that apparent desire to discredit knowledge which 
the claim that knowledge is only relative seems to reveal. This 



Sir JVilliam Hamilton 19 

is the fact that there cooperate in sense perception two things, 
the object and the sense organ, with in some cases also a third 
thing, the intervening medium, to complicate the process. It is 
a natural conclusion to draw from this, that since the activity 
of the object is modified both by the fact that it has to act 
through a transmitting medium, and by the peculiarities of the 
organic structure, the result cannot be equivalent to the origi- 
nating cause; if object and organism have to combine in pro- 
ducing perception, perception cannot truly represent the object 
alone. 

It is not easy to decide in Hamilton's case just how seriously 
we ought to take this conclusion. Of course the physical effect 
of the interaction of two things is not identical with either of 
them by itself; but we are not supposed to be dealing here with 
physiology. On the other hand it is a plain fact that eccen- 
tricities of the organism sometimes interfere to falsify the evi- 
dence we seem to get from the senses, as is shown by the way 
in which we are constantly discovering how to make allowance 
for organic conditions. But this, so far from meaning that 
knowledge is essentially and necessarily imperfect, implies the 
contrary; we can know that a given piece of knowledge is in- 
adequate only through the possession of adequate knowledge by 
which to correct it. A metaphysical doctrine of relativity, 
however, evidently intends to refer to knowledge intrinsically 
and always. We need then a plain answer to the question, 
Does the cooperation of the senses, or the mind, in knowledge, 
bring it about that the character attributed to reality always is 
different from the character it actually possesses? or may we 
know characters as they really are? The plain answer in 
Hamilton's case is not forthcoming. On the one hand the im- 
portance assigned to the doctrine that knowledge is dependent 
on the cooperation of different factors, strongly suggests that 
we intend the former implication; otherwise, again, relativity 
stands only for the truism that we cannot know unless we have 
the proper means of knowledge. However we are not com- 



20 English and American Philosophy 

pelled to attribute this to Hamilton. Logically his thesis that 
the full object presented to the mind is something compounded 
of the external object, the external medium, and the living 
organ of sense in their mutual relation,^ may mean, not that 
each single element in knowledge is due to the combination of 
causes, but that there are different elements some of which are 
due to one factor and some to another; in which case it is our 
business to distinguish them, and assign them each to its proper 
source. If such is the meaning, any thoroughgoing doctrine of 
relativity as a doctrine of necessary falsification breaks down; 
in the end, though not immediately, we can know qualities that 
belong to reality itself, since a critical analysis can eliminate 
the subjective elements, and leave the objective in their purity. 
This is the way in which Hamilton himself apparently intended 
to have us understand him; and indeed it would seem that it 
must be his interpretation when we turn to another cardinal 
point in his philosophy. For it is the whole contention of his 
perceptual realism, in opposition to Brown, that in perception 
we have immediate knowledge of external reality itself, sup- 
posedly in its true nature. 

So far, then, we cannot be certain that we have got beyond 
the doctrine that we know only the qualities of things and not 
their underlying substance; for no decisive reason has been 
given why we should not know these qualities as they really 
are. And as Hamilton's realism implies that we do know them 
as they are in certain cases, his realism and his relativity — if 
relativity is to be supposed to cast some discredit on our knowl- 
edge — are not in entire harmony. But now there are two 
further refinements in the meaning of relativity which carry 
us nearer to Hamilton's real interests, and which divide the 
responsibility between them for what may seem on the surface 
at least its inconsistent demands; the first becomes a tool for 
upholding the reality of our knowledge of the world of sense 
perception, and the second justifies that conviction of the 

"^Metaphysics, Vol. I, pp. 146 f. (Edin. and Lond., 18S9). 



Sir William Hamilton 21 

"imbecility" of the human mind which relativity certainly is in- 
tended to suggest. 

4. The doctrine that sense qualities are the outcome of an 
interaction between two causal agents tended, as we saw, to 
throw doubt on their claim to reach reality. But now there is 
a variant conception here. When the claim that in perception 
we know matter directly is uppermost, relativity gets a further 
meaning. It stands, that is, as a description of the internal 
content of the perceiving experience itself, and no longer as a 
statement of the relationship between the human faculties and 
a cause beyond experience. In perception, namely, Hamilton 
thinks that matter is always recognized as distinguished from 
the self that perceives it, and that both alike — self and not- 
self — are present, as related, directly to consciousness, or 
within consciousness.^ And in this way relativity is made, not 
to throw doubt upon, but to validate, the claim to real knowl- 
edge. To say, with the idealists or the sceptics, that we per- 
ceive only modifications of our own minds, is a falsification of 
the fact. Perception is always of something distinguished, in 
the very act of perceiving, from any possible modification of 
the self; and accordingly if we trust consciousness we have the 
right to claim an immediate, though a relative, knowledge of 
the external world, possessing the same certainty that everyone 
recognizes as attaching to the testimony of consciousness to the 
subjective element. 

5. The doctrine of perceptual realism which here enters on 
the scene is exceedingly difficult to state satisfactorily. It may 
perhaps best be approached by contrasting it with Reid's 
realism. The strong point in Reid's contention is his un- 
qualified adherence to the common-sense judgment that some- 
how our knowledge fastens on the thing itself, and not on a 
mere subjective copy of it ; in perception, and in thought gen- 
erally, we are aware of only one object, and that the real one. 
But this so far is a fact simply, which does not supply its own 

^Ibid., I, p. 288; Discussions, pp. 56 f., 60 (N. Y., 1858). 



22 English and American Philosophy 

interpretation; and it might not be inconsistent with a mediat- 
ist view of knowledge if this were qualified with sufficient care. 
Even if objects are known only through the medium of sen- 
sations or ideas, there still might be a way to conceive of this 
without having to deny that the original knowledge-reference is 
directed to the object, and not to the mental medium. Ham- 
ilton however is not so much concerned with the common- 
sense conviction, as with a certain metaphysical interpretation 
which he gives to it — the interpretation that, to be known 
realistically, the object must be actually present within con- 
sciousness, and identified as an existent with the experienced 
quality. This metaphysical notion of inmiediacy Hamilton 
makes the essence of Reid's doctrine, and he sets out to justify 
it against Brown, who, he rightly saw, had given up realism in 
this peculiar sense. 

But in doing this he develops consequences which, if Reid's 
intention was to justify common-sense belief, have surprisingly 
little in common with the spirit of his master. In the first 
place, he is led to falsify entirely the testimony of experience 
when he comes to knowledge in the form of thought and mem- 
ory, and to adopt the very position which the Scottish phi- 
losophy supposed itself to have refuted. Reid had said, with 
quite obvious truth, that when I remember an object previously 
seen, I remember the object itself, and not a present image of 
it; and this claim is not affected by any doubt that may attach 
to his further denial of the existence of an image altogether. 
Hamilton sees that there is such a thing psychologically as an 
image, which alone is immediately present. But because of 
his dogma that knowledge can be immediate only in case its 
object is literally there and in contact with the knower, he is 
forced to hold that we cannot in memory know the past object, 
since this is no longer present; what I know is my present 
memory-image, and I infer the real object from this. In 
memory, the position of Reid has thus been abandoned com- 
pletely, and a return made to the representative theory. 



Sir William Hamilton 23 

It is only in sense p)erception, accordingly, that the possi- 
bility of immediate knowledge remains. But even here Ham- 
ilton is compelled, in the interests of his metaphysical thesis, to 
depart from everyday belief almost as widely as idealism had 
done. Since the object, to be known immediately, has to be 
identically present, any removal of the object in space or time 
is sufficient to prevent such knowledge. One difficulty here 
which would appeal to the modern psychologist — the difficulty 
that perception occurs an appreciable time interval after the 
stimulus affects the sense organ — Hamilton gets round by 
denying the fact; the difficulty in terms of space he meets by 
recasting our naive belief. Reid had said, I do not see a sen- 
sation of the sun, but the real sun. No, says Hamilton, this is 
ridiculous — that is, logically inconsistent with my definition of 
immediacy — since the real sun is separated from us by millions 
of miles; what I really see is the light rays in contact with the 
retina. But Hamilton is not able even to stop here; and in 
the Notes on Reid, which represent his final belief, it appears 
that it is after all not the light rays that we know directly, but, 
instead, certain qualities of the organism itself. To justify the 
light ray theory, Hamilton had been forced to extend the mind 
beyond the brain to the surfaces of the body, in order to make 
it possible for external things to get in contact with it. But 
even contact is not sufficient, since the colliding object still lies 
beyond the mind; to overcome the separation we have to get 
reality actually inside the body. Accordingly it becomes nec- 
essary to make a distinction. Since the external reality itself 
still remains outside, and so beyond consciousness, we are com- 
pelled to separate in our explanation extra-bodily existence, and 
intra-organic quality. For the first of these, Hamilton now 
resorts to what is essentially Brown's doctrine; the existence 
of external things is not strictly an immediate fact of con- 
sciousness, but is due to an experience of resisted movement 
through which we acquire the belief in an independent counter- 
force — a belief that may conceivably be mistaken, even though 



24 English and American Philosophy 

we find it practically impossible to doubt it. All that is left 
standing of immediate realism is, accordingly, the presence 
within consciousness of certain real physical qualities which 
are known inmiediately as qualities of the organism itself, but 
which, since the organism is of a piece with the rest of the 
world, we are justified in using to interpret also the nature of 
that outside force revealed by the feeling of resistance. To 
establish this first possibility it only remains to break down 
the hard and fast separation between matter and sensitivity, so 
that a sensation can at the same time be held to be an affection 
of the physical organism itself; sensations, that is, are to be 
regarded as belonging neither to the body alone, nor to the 
mind alone, but to the composite of which each is a constituent. 
Here Hamilton leaves much to be desired in the way of clear- 
ness; but his view seems to be that the real or primary quali- 
ties of matter actually get inside consciousness in the shape of 
relationships of "outness" immediately observable among sec- 
ondary sensational qualities, and recognized as a not-self over 
against the self.^ 

6. It is sufficiently apparent how far in such a doctrine we 
have gone from Reid's demand that we accept the practical 
truth of our common-sense beliefs, as against unwarranted 
theoretical constructions. And it is not clear even that we have 
saved the dogma in the interest of which the theory is devised. 
This dogma is, that a knowledge of the external world is 
guaranteed by Consciousness, and that Consciousness is never 
by any possibility open to doubt. Now this introduction of 
consciousness contributes very sensibly to the obscurities of 
Hamilton's position, though it also serves to call attention to 
their source. By consciousness, Reid had been accustomed to 
mean the power, or faculty, through which we become aware of 
the operations of the mind; it corresponds substantially to the 
power of "introspection," conceived however as an immediate 
rather than a reflective act. Brown had abandoned this along 
^Reid, Note D * 



Sir William Hamilton 25 

with other faculties, and had used the term of the series of 
feelings themselves, the stream of "conscious states." In a 
general way Hamilton goes back to Reid's conception, in that 
consciousness stands for an immediate and indubitable knowl- 
edge of the present content of our minds. But he objects 
to Reid's limitation of consciousness to a special faculty of 
selj knowledge, while turning over our acquaintance with 
matter to something called Perception; if we know the ego 
and the non-ego through separate faculties, of what sort, 
he asks, is the act that distinguishes and relates the two? And 
he meets the difficulty by his own theory that "consciousness" 
reveals not the self alone, but always self and not-self in rela- 
tion. Hamilton's motive here is clear enough; he wants to say 
that we are conscious of the object, because only immediate 
presence to consciousness supplies indubitable "knowledge," in 
distinction from possibly mistaken "belief." But in spite of 
all his efforts his theory fails after all to give him this; and 
his discussion turns into an effort to camouflage the fact with- 
out qualifying his original claims. As the analysis of sense p>er- 
ception has compelled him to admit, no belief in objects outside 
the organism possesses strict necessity, though such objects are 
essential to what we mean by an external world; what then 
does the authority of "consciousness" amount to in such a case? 
Not, he confesses, to the authorization of a belief in matter, 
but to the recognition that matter is what men actually do be- 
lieve in; all that consciousness testifies to is the nature of our 
belief, self-evident as a matter of introspective analysis, but 
furnishing no criterion. of the belief's validity. For the last we 
have to fall back, as Reid and Brown had done, merely on the 
impossibility of giving up the belief without practical bank- 
ruptcy, since if consciousness is proved false in one point, 
its whole authority is undermined.^ But in this case belief is 
sufficient, and the peculiar virtue supposed to reside in 
Hamilton's theory of consciousness disappeais. 

^ Reid, Note A, II, IV; Metaphysics, I, pp. 271 ff. 



26 English and American Philosophy 

Meanwhile it should be noticed that the whole doctrine of 
the relativity of knowledge in the sense we are now considering 
rests on a very doubtful basis. It has been assumed as some- 
thing which nobody can seriously question, that we are con- 
scious, in every act of knowledge, of self and not-self as two 
related factors, and that it is impossible for us to know without 
at the same time knowing that we know. As a matter of fact 
we are conscious of nothing of the sort. When I look at an 
object, there is no need whatever that the content of knowl- 
edge should at the same time include a reference to myself; 
unless I am in a sophisticated mood, the probability is that it 
will not include this. Hamilton is using here the evidence, 
not of perception, but of a later reflective judgment. Naturally 
when I think about my perception of an object, subject and 
object are present in my thought; I carmot think of a thing as 
known without a reference to the correlative term "knower." 
But there is no reason why I should not think of things without 
thinking of them as known. 

7. We may, then, in estimating the fifth and last sense of 
relativity, turn from Hamilton's confused doctrine of conscious- 
ness, to the plain meaning which he shares with Reid. Here 
the authority of consciousness means only the authority of 
common sense, or of those fundamental beliefs which depend 
upon nature or instinct rather than upon reason or speculative 
theory. And it is in the Hght of this that we may understand 
that notion of relativity on which Hamilton's agnosticism 
chiefly rests. For this agnosticism is not as bad as it sounds. 
It is primarily concerned not with perception, nor with the 
validity of primitive beliefs, but with reason; and the relativity 
of knowledge is designed to vindicate perception and common 
sense in opposition to the misleading deliverances of the specu- 
lative faculty. It is not, then, that Hamilton distrusts in a 
thoroughgoing way the soundness of the human mind. What 
he distrusts is only a one-sided reliance on logic and ratioci- 
nation. And it is to this that he opposes his grand principle — 



Sir IVilliani Hamilton 27 

"the facts of consciousness, the whole facts, and nothing but the 
facts." Here the second phrase stands for the need of taking 
into account the moral and religious side of human nature as 
well as the intellect; the third stands for the need of keeping 
close to the primitive and intuitive deliverances of the mind, — 
incomprehensible indeed, but only in the sense that, as they are 
the basis of all explanation, there is nothing more ultimate in 
terms of which to explain them, — and of defending these 
against presumptuous efforts to put in their place man-made 
theories and hypotheses. 

But Hamilton, as usual, goes beyond the common-sense at- 
titude of his predecessors, and complicates the matter by meta- 
physical subtleties. And in particular he turns to a sort of 
consideration which always has a peculiar fascination for the 
true metaphysician. The main proof of the "imbecility" of the 
speculative mind Hamilton finds in the antinomies of reason 
— in the fact, namely, that when we leave the realm of homely 
matters of experience, and aim at a knowledge of the Infinite 
and the Absolute, we find ourselves driven by an equal neces- 
sity of reason to contradictory conclusions. And what we are 
to deduce from this is, that the Creator did not intend the mind 
to roam in these exalted spheres. This does not mean, once 
more, an entire distrust of human powers. The very argu- 
ment which proves the incompetence of the reason depends for 
its force on our confidence in the veracity of the mind's ulti- 
mate and unreasoned intuitions. I find myself, for example, 
unable to conceive space as infinitely extended; and on the 
other hand it is equally impossible for me to conceive it as 
finite and limited, with no other space beyond. But now by a 
law of thought I am forced to believe that one of the con- 
tradictory alternatives is true, even though I am utterly at a 
loss to conceive how it can be true. All that we can conceive — 
and this is the final account of relativity — is a mean between 
two contradictory extremes, both of which are inconceivable, 
but of which, as mutually repugnant, both cannot be false. "A 



28 English and American Philosophy 

learned ignorance is thus the end of philosophy, as it is the 
beginning of theology." And here there comes to light the 
animus that lies back of Hamilton's agnosticism. He would 
destroy reason that he may leave room for faith, would de- 
throne the claims of a "presumptuous knowledge" in order 
that the rest of man's nature may get its rights. 

In this final doctrine of Hamilton's we complete the circle, 
and get into connection again with the first sense of relativity. 
For the Unconditioned which the human mind is incompetent 
to know is the bare concept of substance apart from its qual- 
ities. And so considered, it is a good deal a matter of choice 
whether we shall regard Hamilton's agnosticism as immaterial, 
or as self-defeating. If we suppose, as on the whole the doc- 
trine of perception supposes, that our deiinite perceptual knowl- 
edge is a knowledge of characters that really belong to the 
world, it is knowledge that seemingly ought to be good enough 
for anybody. If on the other hand, as in his metaphysical 
moods Hamilton constantly implies, such relative knowledge is 
illusory and unreal, if the mere fact that what we know is 
something in particular debars it from being knowledge, and 
true reality is the entire absence of distinctions,^ it would seem 
that the very effort to think is suicidal, and every system alike 
goes down in the general crash. Hamilton's philosophy would 
then be only an attempt to deduce the theoretical consequences 
of a certain particular and quite arbitrary definition of the Ab- 
solute, as a unity apart from all multiplicity and all specific 
inner character in terms of interrelated content; in which case 
it need be no great cause for surprise if the attempt ends in 
self-contradiction. Hamilton's practical intention however is 
much more modest and plausible; what really moves him is the 
conviction that we are not forced of necessity to abandon be- 
liefs because we cannot fully understand them and set forth 
their "why" and "how." But he weakens his case by the 
peculiar limitation which he gives to "faith." Reid also in a 

* Discussions, pp. 26, 39 f. 



Sir William Hamilton 29 

sense falls back upon faith; but the principles of common 
sense which must be accepted in the end on trust are not pre- 
vented thereby from being essentially intelligible, even though 
they cannot be deduced from anything more ultimate. Hamil- 
ton, on the contrary, tends to regard as the proper object of 
faith that which in its nature is inconceivable. But faith in 
something which, if accepted, makes the world rational, is one 
thing; faith in what we are incapable of bringing before the 
mind in terms of thought is quite another. To assert, for 
example, that we believe in the personality of God, while at 
the same time we take the ground that this must be something 
totally different from what human beings understand by per- 
sonality, is merely to utter sounds without sense. 

8. It is in connection with Hamilton's justification of re- 
ligious faith that we find the chief ground for the charge made 
by the rival school of the Utilitarians against the intuitionists 
generally, that with them philosophy is used to countenance the 
irrational, and serve as a bulwark against reform in Church 
and State. The possibility exists; and if reactionaries were 
much given to philosophy we might expect to find them sym- 
pathetic with intuitionist doctrines. It does not seem to be 
the case however that any serious charge of obscurantism can 
be brought against the more eminent representatives of com- 
mon sense. Dugald Stewart was indeed a liberal of a fairly 
engaging sort, who in his class room disseminated ideas of 
sweetness and light which had no inconsiderable effect on the 
new generation; though it is also true that he took care to 
keep to terms too general to excite much chance of odium, and 
could recommend himself to a noble correspondent on the 
ground that, while he had at one time expressed himself warmly 
about the slave trade — the only question touching political 
issues on which he had ever presumed to influence his pupils — 
he had at once withdrawn these expressions when the question 
came to be a matter of general discussion. To be sure, all 
the common-sense philosophers were friends of religion, and 



30 English and American Philosophy 

argued in its favor; but this by itself is hardly to be held 
against them. It is only in one disciple of Hamilton — Dean 
Mansel — that we come across a development which seems to 
offer some justification for the dislike and suspicion of the 
radicals. 

What Mansel sets out to do is to defend the Christian re- 
ligion as an authoritative and supernatural revelation, by 
showing the inadequacy of any philosophy whose "final test 
of truth is placed in the direct assent of the human conscious- 
ness, whether in the form of logical deduction, or moral judg- 
ment, or religious intuition." And the particular method he 
adopts is one he had learned from Hamilton's philosophy of 
relativity, whose puzzles about the absolute and the infinite 
he refines upon with much ingenuity; though our confidence 
in his metaphysical grasp is not likely to be strengthened when 
we find him implying that the necessary existence of an ab- 
solute apart from relations is convertible with the necessity 
that God should have existed alone prior to the creation of 
the world. The method consists in an attempt to bar the ''in- 
trusion of the human intellect into sacred things," by turning 
criticism on the mind itself, and making it appear that reason 
suffers from a fundamental defect which renders it an insuffi- 
cient test of truth. The difficulties which the rationalists pro- 
fess to discover in theology are in fact inherent in the very laws 
of human thought, and must accompany any attempt at 
speculation, religious or irreligious ; they tell equally against all 
belief and all unbelief, so that to turn to reason is merely to for- 
sake an incomprehensible doctrine which rests upon the word of 
God, for one equally incomprehensible which rests upon the 
word of man. Why for example should we take offence at the 
doctrine of the Trinity, when it involves just the problem of 
the One and the Many before which philosophy is helpless? or 
why make a difficulty out of God's performing miracles, when 
the real difficulty lies in understanding how anything can act 
at all? 



Dean Mans el 31 

What this meant concretely was a reversal of the growing 
tendency to humanize tradition by bringing it to the test of 
our best human insight, and a return to the old emphasis on 
external proofs. The legitimate object, says Mansel, of a 
rational criticism of revealed religion is not to be found in 
the content of that religion, but in its evidences; we must ab- 
stain from passing judgment on the nature of the message, un- 
til we have fairly examined the supernatural credentials of 
the messenger. There are two obvious elements of risk in 
such an attitude. It leaves religion, in the first place, help- 
less in case this fails. Mansel considers that he is safeguard- 
ing Christianity by disabling the weapons of rationalism, and 
staking everything on the historical proof for the miraculous; 
he does not realize that this is precisely where the opponent 
of Christianity is now most content to rest his case. And 
the second danger is, that the line of defence which Mansel 
adopts may result in a straining of the alliance between re- 
ligion and the moral insight. In holding that our human 
morality is only an imperfect translation of the divine nature, 
and that therefore we cannot condemn revelation simply be- 
cause it fails to meet our moral tests, it is true Mansel does 
not intend to make these last of no effect. On the whole, 
morality represents the truest content we can import into our 
conception of God. But it is far from infallible; and we are 
not to pronounce too hastily therefore in view of an appearance 
of contradiction. Mansel has to meet two main sorts of moral 
objection to Christianity. One is supplied by Bible narratives 
which represent men as called upon to act by the command 
of God against the dictates of ordinary morality — what Mansel 
calls "moral miracles." The other is the attribution to God 
himself of elements of character out of harmony with our nat- 
ural moral demands. In neither case is his reply convincing. 
Genuinely to conceive that the thing which I reprobate in 
man becomes in God worthy of love and reverence, is not, it 
would seem, a sure way of recommending religion to the mod- 



;^2 English and American Philosophy 

em world; and the Utilitarians appear not to have been alto- 
gether wrong when they detected in it an affinity with the ob- 
structive forces in government and society. For the ground 
on which, in particular, Mansel bases the probability of a two- 
fold standard, is precisely the fact of authority or power In 
God, and the lack of any presumption, therefore, that the in- 
finite moral governor will be bound by the same rules as the 
"finite moral servant." 

9. Something of the same temper of mind that in meta- 
physics led to a reliance upon common sense, and in a form 
more justly open on the whole to the strictures of the radical 
critics, shows itself also in the group of Whig essayists and 
politicians whose literary activity centers about the Edinburgh 
Review. None of these are of any great importance for the 
history of ideas; they are clever and versatile rather than 
original or penetrating. But collectively they illustrate a 
typical attitude which is apt to be influential out of proportion 
to its intellectual merits. The Whig temper is compoimded of 
a natural generosity of spirit, along with a strong infusion of 
judicial caution passing over into intellectual timidity. Francis 
Jeffrey, in some ways the most important name here, is ob- 
trusively of this type. He is a man who moves at his ease only 
within the familiar field of the middle-class proprieties. His 
appeal is always to the "sober and correct part of mankind"; 
he prefers in conduct the "beaten path of morality," and has 
a vivid feeling for the risk attending any deviation from the 
"large average which is implied in those moral preferences that 
are universally prevalent." In philosophy proper this temper 
shows in his very moderate notion of the powers of the phil- 
osophic intellect; he finds some good in both the rival schools 
of his day, without taking either very seriously. This cautious 
estimation of the powers of the intellect is used by Jeffrey as 
a reason for the temperate character of his hopes for social re- 
form. The dreams of human perfectibility, whose basis mostly 
had been found in the growth of knowledge and intelligence, 



Francis Jeffrey 33 

he discards as "utterly futile." History shows that a growing 
knowledge makes men neither better nor happier; in some 
ways they are further from the goal of their desires. The 
more intelligence a man develops, the more difficult it becomes 
to find a scheme of life to measure up to his increase of critical 
subtlety, and his loss of illusions; it is "knowledge that destroys 
enthusiasms." The political issue is close at hand ; let us make 
the best of what we have, and not expect any drastic changes 
for the better. Meanwhile if we are not satisfied, as good 
Christians we can look to a future life. Concretely Jeffrey's 
political theory amounts to this: that while a nation should 
be dominated by its "natural aristocracy," there also should 
be, in the representative body, an organ to afford a direct, safe, 
and legitimate way in which public opinion may be brought 
to bear upon those in office. The great source of danger to the 
modern state lies in the extension of intelligence and power 
without the corresponding growth of political forms for making 
this felt; and it was, he thought, the special role of the Whig 
party to guide the new democratic forces into safe channels, 
to "first conciliate, then restrain the people, save them from the 
leaders they are beginning to choose from their own body, 
and become themselves their leaders, by becoming their pa- 
trons, and their cordial though authoritative advisers." 

10. Sydney Smith is in some ways a more favorable exam- 
ple of the English liberal, though hardly so typical, since the 
possession of a sense of humor prevents him from taking him- 
self always with quite the proper degree of seriousness. "I 
have," Smith writes, "a passionate love for common justice and 
for common sense" — a combination which constitutes the Whig 
temper at its best. Common sense in Smith's case, under the in- 
fluence of his somewhat caustic wit, at times is responsible for 
an unnecessary harshness and lack of sympathy in his judg- 
ments; like Jeffrey, he is too ready to take the opinions of 
the average sensible Englishman as his standard, and to set 
aside what goes beyond this as "metaphysical lunacies." So of 



34 English and American Philosophy 

his attitude toward religious enthusiasms that offended his own 
preference for a gentleman's religion within the bounds of good 
taste — Methodism on the one hand, and on the other "New- 
mania," and the growing cult of ritual. However in a way it 
might appear that just this coolness of tem.per, and the moder- 
ation of his demands on life, are connected with his love of 
justice; in a world which is a "sorry business at the best," man's 
inhumanity to man can least of all be justified. A younger, 
and in some respects the most brilliant member of the group, is 
Macaulay. In Macaulay the latent dislike of principled rea- 
soning becomes open and aggressive. "Every man who has 
seen the world knows that nothing is so useless as a general 
maxim"; up to Bacon's day "words, and more words, and noth- 
ing but words, has been all the fruit of all the toU of all the 
most renowned sages of sixty generations." Quibbling about 
self-interest, and motives, and objects of desire, and the great- 
est happiness of the greatest number, he writes in a well-known 
passage of the Utilitarian endeavor to imderstand the springs 
of moral conduct, is but a "poor employment for a grown 
man," though it certainly "hurts the health less than hard drink- 
ing, and is immeasurably more humane than cock fighting." 
Equally sensible, unambitious, and pedestrian is his conception 
of the social end — not to aim at man's perfection, but to "make 
imperfect man comfortable"; and a new motivation to this is 
worth all the theorizing in the world. Macaulay could see 
no fault in the Constitution, but only in its administration; 
and accordingly he could work wholeheartedly in the faith that 
a Whig ministry was the one chief instrument of the world's 
salvation. 

II. Sir James Mackintosh is the philosopher of the Edin- 
burgh group, and in him the attitude of suspicion toward a 
strenuous life of the speculative intellect is displaced by a 
considerable degree of philosophical ardor. Mackintosh is a 
man of great and showy gifts — though he is lacking in steady 



Sir James Mackintosh 35 

application, — who all his life oscillated between the claims of 
scholarly and academic ambition, and the attractions of the 
greater world of politics and society in which he was eminently 
fitted to shine. As might perhaps be expected from one whose 
ideal of speculative competence is the amiable Cicero, his 
philosophical writings are more fluent than profound or rigor- 
ous. His chief claim to attention is in the field of ethics. Here, 
starting from the general principles of experience and utility, 
he attempts to turn the utility philosophy into a form less 
suggestive of radical consequences, and more in harmony with 
his own expressed belief that morals have always been sta- 
tionary and are likely to continue so, and that a man ought 
in reason therefore to be governed, not by his own opinion 
about the tendency of actions, but by those "fixed and unal- 
terable rules which are the joint result of the impartial judg- 
ment, the natural feelings, and the embodied experience of 
mankind." The original source of all conduct Mackintosh 
finds in our primitive desires, ultimately perhaps in a few 
organic ones. But though at the start life may have been 
egoistic, it has developed the power to take an immediate 
interest also in things other than the private self. Pleasures 
— which presuppose already existing desires — may be trans- 
ferred in a great variety of directions to the means involved 
in their attainment, which by association become as stable 
and indecomposable objects of desire as the original end of 
action. And in particular they are transferred to the mental 
dispositions themselves, and the voluntary actions that flow 
from these. It is an essential of morality that we should 
have come to care directly for such habitual dispositions and 
not merely for their consequences, and so to take pleasure in 
the virtuous activity for its own sake; a man v/ho fights simply 
because he thinks it more hazardous to yield has not yet the 
virtue of courage. It is the interwoven mass of such disposi- 
tions and will-acts, become an end in itself, that constitutes 



36 English and American Philosophy 

conscience, the pleasures of a good conscience thus tending to 
supersede the useful consequences from which this pleasure 
originally was borrowed. 

In this way Mackintosh would reconcile the claims of utility 
and of intuitionalism, by separating the questions to which 
respectively they supply an answer. Ethics is concerned with 
two problems — the nature of the distinction between right and 
wrong, and the nature of the feelings with which right and 
wrong are contemplated. The foundation and ultimate cri- 
terion of moral rules are indeed to be found in utility, which 
thus provides a support to Butler's doctrine of the suprem- 
acy of conscience; but utility is not what the mind, formed 
by past experience and association, commonly holds before 
itself consciously as its immediate standard and its motive. 
Men are so constituted as instantaneously to approve certain 
actions without any reference to their consequences; though 
reason may nevertheless discover that a tendency to produce 
general happiness is the essential characteristic of these actions. 
Of Mackintosh's political philosophy, only a word needs to be 
added; on the whole it is of a sort to illustrate the ease with 
which good philosophical reasons can be found to defend the 
indefensible — take for example the justification of the anoma- 
lies of the English representative system. The main outcome 
is a theory of the state as a representation of interests or 
classes, which are to serve as a check on one another, and 
guard each its own order from oppression by the rest — a doc- 
trine well adapted, when manipulated expertly by politicians, 
to hinder the removal of existing class privileges, while yet 
paying in a verbal currency the claims of every class alike. 

§ 3. Other Intuitionalists. Calderwood. Martineau. Ferrier 

I. As a philosophical school. Common Sense reached its 
culmination in Hamilton, and of other contemporary repre- 
sentatives of the tendency a brief mention is sufficient. The 



The Intuitionalist School 37 

most eminent name here is that of Thomas Chalmers, whose 
reputation, however, is due to his career as a preacher and phi- 
lanthropist rather than as a philosopher. Chalmers' chief specu- 
lative interest is in the application of philosophy to theology; 
he perhaps comes nearest to independent thinking in the dis- 
tinction which he draws, in connection with the argument from 
design, between the origin and laws of matter, and the disposi- 
tions of matter, on which last he made the strength of the 
argument to turn. Chalmers was most immediately influ- 
enced by Brown in his philosophical standpoint; and Brown's 
influence continued for a decade or so to be predominant. 
Among other writers of the period, all of them identified with 
the Scottish tradition, may be mentioned the names of John 
Young, George Payne, John Ballantyne, and John Abercrombie, 
the last the author of two popular manuals which passed 
through numerous editions. Isaac Taylor and Samuel Bailey 
were also influenced by Reid, though the connection is a much 
looser one. Bailey is one of the most prolific writers of the 
period on philosophic and semi-philosophic themes, and dis- 
plays a good deal of vigor and independence of thought, es- 
pecially in criticism; he deserves well as a defender of in- 
tellectual liberty. 

In the thirties Brown's star rapidly waned, and Hamilton's 
came to be in the ascendent; and Hamilton's prestige con- 
tinued to be very great until it suffered serious damage by 
the publication in 1865 of J. S. Mill's critical attack. While 
however Hamilton was generally recognized on the basis of 
his attainments and reputation as the leader of the school, 
he was not particularly successful in securing acceptance for 
the doctrines on whose originality he most prided himself; 
the peculiarities of his theory of perception were largely suf- 
fered to drop into the background, and the Unknowable was 
often viewed with active suspicion. Apart from Mansel, the 
one important disciple of Hamilton here is indeed to be found 
in the opposite camp of the scientific naturalists; and in 



38 English and American Philosophy 

Herbert Spencer the doctrine is turned to uses with which 
Hamilton could have had no possible sympathy. In a few 
cases an open revolt took place among those who sympathized 
with his general position. Thus Richard Lowndes protests 
against the dangers of a philosophy which undertakes to make 
us Christians by first making us thoroughgoing sceptics, and 
attempts to meet Hamilton and Mansel by an argument in- 
tended to show that the mind has a power to think that which 
it cannot imagine. 

2. A still more vigorous attack, from the standpoint of an 
interest in religious knowledge, upon the doctrine of the mind's 
imbecility, came from Henry Calderwood. Calderwood's 
Philosophy of the Infinite is an able piece of polemical writ- 
ing, which puts its finger on a number of the weak points in 
Hamilton's position, and is hardly less than fatal indeed on the 
supposition that one accepts sincerely, as Hamilton did, the 
fundamentals of the Christian belief about God. Calder- 
wood has little difficulty in showing the absurdity of a pre- 
tence to religious belief which denies any intelligible content 
to the object of belief. So Hamilton's underlying thesis that 
the notion of the Absolute, or God, involves an entire ab- 
sence of relations, is subjected to a damaging criticism. What 
Calderwood himself interprets as the religious demand, is the 
absence in God of a necessary relation to anything beyond his 
own being. God is no less truly infinite because he has in- 
ternal relations in his own nature, or because he is related to 
a world of his own creation; religion only needs to hold that 
he has an existence which does not depend on these related 
things, that he is subject to no restrictive conditions. That 
the full content of the infinite God docs not get within our 
minds, or that our thought of God is not itself infinite, is 
indeed self-evident; but this does not prevent our having a 
limited knowledge of him which is true so far as it goes. 
Calderwood's argument here involves the recognition of what 
would now be called the externality of relations; being known 



Henry Calderwood 39 

makes no difference to the object of knowledge itself. It in- 
volves also the repudiation of Hamilton's doctrine that the ob- 
ject must actually be present in consciousness in order in the 
strict sense to be known; "consciousness" is the sphere in 
which all mental operations exist, but not a sphere into which 
external realities are introduced. When he comes to his 
own alternative doctrine of the Infinite, Calderwood is less 
plausible. We have, it appears, an immediate intuition of God 
as an all-wise, all-powerful, all-just being — an intuition inde- 
pendent of reason, and justified sufficiently by its own self- 
evidence. Here obviously the influence of a robust religious 
faith is more in evidence than a nice perception of the philo- 
sophical problems implicated. There is not even any serious at- 
tempt to analyze and define the conception we are thus asked 
to take on trust, though the assurance that our knowledge of 
God's attributes is distinct from the notion of human attri- 
butes that go by the same name would naturally lead one to 
expect further explanation about their source and nature. 
Calderwood is also the author, among other books, of a manual 
of ethics very widely used for a time, in which the same dog- 
matic intuitionalism is applied to ethical theory. 

3. In America the sway of the Scottish philosophy in the 
colleges was for a time almost complete; James McCosh, a 
pupil of Hamilton's, who was called to America in 1868 to 
become president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, 
is its most prolific and most able representative. America had 
natural points of contact with the intuitionalist creed, in its 
practical and realistic temper of mind, its dislike for the refine- 
ments of speculation, and its demand for dogmatic assurance 
to serve as the basis for an active and aggressive life ruled by 
conventional religious and economic ideals; so that McCosh 
is inclined to pose at times as sponsor for a distinctively 
American philosophy. McCosh's criticisms of sensationalism 
are often well taken, but his own contributions to philosophy 
are unimpressive; he has set forth however in systematic and 



40 English and American Philosophy 

convenient form the intuitionalistic convictions of his school, 
and his history of Scottish philosophy is still useful. 

4. While by the last quarter of the century the common- 
sense philosophy had practically disappeared as a well-defined 
school of thought, much of its spirit still persisted among the 
fairly numerous dissenters who held out against the dominant 
new Idealism; and a few additional names ought probably to 
be classified as still adherents of the traditional Scotch realism. 
Henry Veitch, a pupil and assistant of Hamilton, as well as his 
biographer, is one of the few who seem to have taken seriously 
Hamilton's peculiar doctrine of perception; later on Veitch 
brings the Scottish standpoint of dualism to the criticism of 
Green's idealistic monism. A similar standpoint continues to 
be represented by Robert Flint, who succeeded Ferrier in the 
chair of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrew's University. And 
here belongs also most properly one of the greater names of 
the century — that of the Unitarian minister James Martineau; 
though the connection is disguised by a certain shift of em- 
phasis, as well as by Martineau's emotional earnestness and 
brilliant rhetorical gifts, which lend to his style an eloquence 
seldom in philosophers combined in the same degree with real 
vigor of thought. Within the general framework of a theism 
where God stands as the creator of a real physical world and 
of real finite selves, the outstanding points in Martineau's 
philosophy are, perhaps, the conception of true causality as 
always the expression of active will; of the self as the deposi- 
tory of a limited portion of the causal energy that resides ulti- 
mately in God, through which the self is raised as an agent 
above the world of passive phenomena, and given the power of 
free response to the Divine Archetype; of Conscience as point- 
ing unmistakably to an eternal Lawgiver, apart from whom the 
notion of a law imposed upon us, and coming home to our 
consciousness in the sense of duty, has no meaning; of knowl- 
edge as in essence always a judgment, which affirms existence 
of an object over against the Ego; and of the fundamental 



James Martineau 41 

reasonableness of putting trust in the testimony of our facul- 
ties, alike intellectual and emotional, in their natural exer- 
cise. Martineau's argument for God has two chief steps — the 
metaphysical argument from Causation, which, as Power, not 
mere Law, is unintelligible except in terms of the activity of a 
personal Will; and the revelation, in conscience, of the nature 
of this Cause, as a righteous lawgiver and source of moral 
value. Martineau's most original contribution to philosophy, 
however, is his ethical theory of an inherent gradation of value 
among human motives, which we are constituted with the 
power of perceiving directly under conditions of their concrete 
presence. It is arguable that such an instinctive feeling for 
differences of quality is a more important feature of the ethical 
experience than most systems have recognized. But the ab- 
solute scale of motives in which Martineau sees it taking form 
has apparently been found verifiable by no one but himself. 
One further point against the theory is the fact that, as he 
admits, the same immediacy may attach to the comparison of 
very complex groups of motives — and the ethical situation is 
nearly always complex — as attaches to simple ones; and this 
can apparently on his showing be accounted for only by assign- 
ing to the intuitive machinery a degree of intricacy very 
difficult to accept. 

5. Two names have been left to the conclusion of this 
chapter because, while they have their roots in the Scottish 
tradition, they depart from it somewhat widely in the general 
direction of the later German idealism. J. D. Morell was led 
by his early admiration for the writings of Thomas Brown 
to study philosophy in Scotland, and from thence he pro- 
ceeded on a philosophical pilgrimage to Germany and to 
France. This continental influence shows itself in an emphasis 
on the distinction between Understanding and Reason, which 
last Morell thinks competent to ground a knowledge of ab- 
solute reality or God ; the nature of Reason however he leaves 
obscure. Morell had read widely, and a real catholicity of 



42 English and /imerican Philosophy 

mind is in evidence in his writings; his History of Modern 
Philosophy was a useful survey of the field of contemporary 
thought, which helped break down the insularity of British 
metaphysics. 

James Ferrier has much more claim to rank as an original 
thinker. In spite of a community with German absolutism 
in the outcome, Ferrier himself asserted, even with heat, that 
his philosophy was autochthynous; and this is substantially 
the case. His speculations show everywhere a Scottish back- 
ground; and while he had what for his time was a consid- 
erable acquaintance at first hand with German philosophical 
literature, he never fully understood its point of view. Thus 
his criticisms of Kant are frequently wide of the mark, and 
Hegel he himself confesses to be "impenetrable almost through- 
out as a mountain of adamant." 

Ferrier's philosophy shows a certain naivete which makes 
him nearly always interesting and amusing reading, but which 
discounts somewhat the claims he is disposed to advance for it. 
His interest is primarily in logical system, and in the progres- 
sive discovery of chains of reasoning; and in consequence there 
is a character of remoteness and unreality which is seldom 
quite absent from his speculations. He is aware of this him- 
self, but shifts the responsibility to the nature of philosophy. 
It is nothing against the philosopher, he urges, that his results 
controvene universal convictions, and are out of touch with 
the supposed realities of man's daily life; philosophizing is 
concerned solely with processes of rigid deduction, and ought 
therefore to hold natural human thinking cheap. In such an 
attitude he is clearly influenced by his reaction against the 
pedestrian methods of the common-sense school, and its lack 
of thoroughgoing logical rigor. For Ferrier, psychology with 
its empirical analysis of the mind is not only inadequate, but 
is wholly in the wrong; so that in fact one can be pretty sure 
of reaching truth by taking its pronouncements, and just re- 
versing them. The only method not philosophically worthless 



James Ferrier 43 

is that of a strict and necessary deduction from self-evident 
premises; and in his chief writing he makes a brave attempt 
to live up to such an ideal. In this there is rather too strong 
a suggestion of the clever pupil who shows his independence 
by going to the opposite extreme from the accepted opinions 
of his teachers; and the impression is strengthened by Ferrier 's 
constant emphasis on the certainty and absoluteness of his 
own conclusions, — his Institutes is ''incontrovertible at every 
point," — and the too frequent implication that all or nearly 
all of previous philosophy is negligible. 

In some earlier articles which Ferrier contributed to Black- 
woods', there is the suggestion of a more human touch. Here, 
something in the vein of Fichte, we find an attempt to inter- 
pret Consciousness as the autonomous expression, not of the 
"mind," — the mind of the psychologist is a mere string of 
changes with the one central fact of the Ego that takes cog- 
nizance of these changes totally ignored, — but of a living 
reality, the man, in the form of an act absolutely original and 
underived; the external world does not stand over against the 
self as its cause, but both come into being through this free 
act of discrimination or negation which resists or denies 
the impressions of sense, as the moral life grows out of a re- 
sistance to the passions and desires. It will be sufficient, how- 
ever, to deal with Ferrier'^s doctrine in the form in which it 
is set forth in his chief writing — the Institutes of Metaphysic. 

6. The purpose of Ferrier 's philosophy is to show the way 
of escape from relativism and scepticism, in the interests of a 
knowledge of absolute and indubitable reality. The initial 
proposition on which the whole argument turns is the Hamil- 
tonian doctrine that we never can know anything as an object 
without at the same time knowing along with it a subject or ego, 
— as Ferrier somewhere puts it, that everything is "steeped 
primordially in me." From this proposition he proceeds to 
draw a number of analytical conclusions, of which the general 
outcome is, that the common-sense and psychological claim 



44 English and American Philosophy 

that we can know matter by itself, or mind by itself, is absurd 
and self -contradictory. In this way we have refuted the thesis 
alike of materialist and of psychological idealist, since each 
supposes that to be real which is only one indivisible aspect of 
the sole knowable reality; and absolute idealism is left alone in 
the field. 

May it not be possible however that, in spite of our neces- 
sary ignorance of matter per se, matter may conceivably exist? 
This Ferrier meets by the second crucial point in his system, 
his Theory of Ignorance, or Agnoiology, on the originality of 
which he specially prides himself. Here the thesis is, that as ig- 
norance is a defect of knowledge, we cannot properly be said to 
be ignorant of anything unless it is capable of being known, 
by some higher intelligence if not by ours. The only thing 
which in strictness is unknowable is the absurd, the meaning- 
less, the self-contradictory; and there is no sense in saying that 
we are ignorant of tliat which has no meaning. We cannot 
intelligibly speak of being ignorant of the "fact" that the part 
is greater than tlie whole, or that two and two make five. But 
now if we can only be ignorant of that which is a possible 
object of knowledge, then we cannot be ignorant of matter 
per se, since matter per se is not a possible object of knowledge. 
The one thing of which we can be ignorant is that same unity 
of subject and object which also is the one thing we can know. 
And if thus ignorance and knowledge both alike lead us to the 
same result, scepticism has broken down, and we have passed 
from Epistemology to Ontology ; we have now the right to say, 
not merely that subject plus object is the absolute for human 
knowledge, but that it is the absolute without qualification. 
Not however my self and its objects merely; as the necessary 
datum is not my self and object, but only some self and object, 
it is possible to thinli of a connection of objects with some 
other self. And since we have reason to believe that / have 
not always existed, we reach the conception of an eternal Ego- 



James Ferrier 45 

plus-objects, or of a God-thinking-the-world, as the ultimate 
ontological fact. 

7. It is apparent that the burden of the system is carried 
by its initial proposition ; and about this it is not so difficult to 
raise doubts as Ferrier would have us think. Ferrier tries to 
give it, as indeed he is bound to do by his principles of method, 
the standing of a necessary truth whose denial involves self- 
contradiction; but as a matter of fact it is plainly an empirical 
truth if it is true at all, and depends upon the results of actual 
observation. Now is it so that we never know anything with- 
out also at the same time knowing the self along with it? 
Ferrier himself recognizes that there are cases where at first 
glance at least we seem not to have any idea of the self in 
mind; and he meets the difficulty by supposing that the idea 
of the self may be present in varying degrees, and sometimes in 
so slight a degree as almost to escape our notice. But if we 
leave the matter here, we have an insecure foundation for a 
system intended to possess demonstrative certainty. Neces- 
sity which depends upon a difficult and subtle matter of intro- 
spection, where trained observers have often professed that 
they found no trace of the self at all, and where at least one 
may honestly be in doubt, is hardly what a systematic meta- 
physics is after. Considerations more rigorous and compelling 
are called for if the theory is to hold securely. 

Ferrier has several suggestions to offer. The one which prob- 
ably is nearest to constituting the main source of his own con- 
viction is as follows: We cannot, he holds, possibly think of 
matter by itself, because the very attempt tO' think it thus 
necessarily involves the self as thinking. Try to imagine the 
world existing as a bare material universe with all thinking 
selves removed. But is every self gone? Must not at least the 
"you" who does the imagining still be on the ground in order 
that a world may be thought of as not containing any self? 

About this argument however there are several points that 



46 English and American Philosophy 

might be noticed. The one really self-evident thing here, to 
begin with, is this, that there cannot be an object of knowl- 
edge except as also there is someone to know; known objects 
imply a self. But this is a truism; it means that w^e cannot 
know a thing without knowing it. And unless we beg the ques- 
tion, and assume that nothing can exist apart from being 
known, it is still open to suppose that the existence which we 
know may be separable from the knowledge of it; in which 
case the fact that the knowledge implies a knowing self is quite 
irrelevant. 

But now in the second place, even in terms of knowledge we 
still are falling short of Ferrier's claim, which is, not that a 
self must be there whenever anything is known, but that it 
must be an actual part of the content of knowledge. But 
the fact to which he is appealing is calculated, if anything, to 
throw doubt upon this thesis. It will hardly be denied that 
people have supposed they could think a mindless world, and 
that for the most part they are likely to be puzzled rather than 
convinced by Ferrier's proof that they cannot. But this would 
seem to show, once more, that when they think of a ma- 
terial universe the thinking self is quite overlooked — that is, 
is not a part of what they are knowing. Later on they may 
come to see that the self actually was there, and then it does 
enter into the content of what is known; but the unavoidable 
difference in the way in which we have to describe the two ex- 
periences throws doubt on the supposition that it was known 
before. 

And now finally, even if Ferrier's argument were accepted, 
it would carry a difficulty for his own philosophy. For if 
I cannot think of anything without this presence of the think- 
ing ego, then, contrary to what Ferrier maintains, it is my 
self plus the object which is the ultimate, and not a self; and 
not only matter, but other selves and God, can be thought by 
me as existing only as my objects. For if it is certain that I 
cannot think a mindless world for the reason that I must 



James Ferrier 47 

be there to think it, it is in the same degree certain that a 
God existing prior to my human life cannot be thought by me, 
because I equally am present when I try to think Him. 

A second and perhaps stronger ground that Ferrier gives 
for his thesis is, that unless, when I perceived an object, I 
were conscious of myself, I could never remember the per- 
ception as mine; since if I failed to recognize the "me" in the 
original experience, I could not find it in the later one. Here 
the difficulty seems to come from overlooking another am- 
biguity. The self, once more, must be there in any knowing 
experience, in the form of experiencing, or feeling, or "living" 
itself. But that there cannot be an immediate feeling ex- 
perience which is not at the same time an object of knowledge, 
is a claim that needs further evidence. It is at least a pos- 
sibility that an experience can be lived through without being 
contemplated as an object, and if so, that it may conceivably 
have some quality — it may be a relationship to specific pur- 
poses, or to judgments of appreciation — which later enables 
it when looked back upon in memory to be known as mine; 
since to be my experience is simply to be recognized as 
of a piece with the continuous context I learn to call my 
life. 

It should be added that there is a way in which Ferrier 
might possibly be interpreted which would relieve his theory 
of some of its difficulties, and bring it very closely into line 
with the later and more orthodox form of English absolutism; 
and a suggestion of this might perhaps be found in his use 
of the subject-object concept to solve among other things the 
problem of the particular and the universal. According to 
this solution, what constitutes the universal is the self-aspect 
of experience, as common to every piece of knowledge alike; 
whereas the object, although some object must always be pres- 
ent, changes in its particular form from moment to moment. 
It is as a matter of fact difficult to see that this has any real 
relevancy to the historical problem of the universal, unless we 



48 English and American Philosophy 

take the "self" to mean the univCTsal bonds of connection that 
unify experience, and not the ego of the Scottish philosophers. 
But there seems no sufficient reason to suppose that Ferrier 
intended any such thoroughgoing reconstruction of the concept. 



CHAPTER II 
THE UTILITARIANS 

§ I. Bent ham. James Mill 

I, The combination of radicalism in politics, and sensa- 
tionalism in philosophy, which goes by the name of Utilitarian- 
ism, is by general consent the most vigorous and original prod- 
uct of English thinking in the first part of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. Spiritually the Utilitarians are descendants of the Ra- 
tionalists of the preceding age. There is the same critical, un- 
imaginative, unemotional outlook on life, which sees what it 
does see with extraordinary clearness and steadiness, but which 
is blind to the subtler shades of insight that do not lend them- 
selves to a precise intellectual and logical formulation. The 
success of the Utilitarians is partly due to this fact that by 
admitting nothing into their scheme of things whose bearing 
was not to them pointed and definite, they were able to work 
for certain limited aims with perfect confidence and directness. 
They knew what they wanted, were sure it was the only thing 
worth wanting, and so were in a position to attempt the get- 
ting of it in the most effective way. But in consequence they 
tended to miss other aspects of substantial good in a world 
in which truth is too large to be summed up in neat and simple 
formulas, and where precision and limitation of end are there- 
fore not an unmixed blessing. 

Between the Rationalists and the Utilitarians there is, how- 
ever, one important difference, a difference primarily of method. 
This comes out clearly in the contrast between the watchword 
of the French Revolution — the Rights of Man, — and the sacred 

49 



50 English and American Philosophy 

word of the newer movement — Utility. Why for example is 
political liberty desirable? Because, said the Rationalists, man 
has certain natural rights which are violated by the necessity 
of submission to a ruler or a ruling class. Because, said the 
Utilitarians, liberty brings about a preponderance of pleasure 
over pain, and a form of government which produces this re- 
sult is thereby empirically justified. In some ways, though 
not in all, the Utilitarian method was a great practical ad- 
vance over previous radicalism. To stop declaiming about 
abstract and inalienable rights, and to set out to locate just 
the points in which existing institutions had vicious results, 
was in so far a gain. And in this the chief importance of the 
movement lies. The Utilitarians are primarily political re- 
formers. They possess a philosophy, an ethics, a psychology, 
an economics, but these are all subordinate to their practical 
ends; they are interested in them first of all as a background to 
their social schemes, and as instruments of attack upon tradi- 
tion. 

2. Utilitarianism has its proximate starting point in Jeremy 
Bentham. In point of time considerably the larger half of 
Bentham's life belongs to the preceding century, and his most 
important writing, for philosophy, was first published in 1789. 
Intellectually however he is identified closely with the modem 
age. Outwardly his life was highly uneventful; he lived prac- 
tically as a recluse, coming into contact with the actual working 
of things, and with real men and women, only through the 
medium of a small circle of immediate friends and more or 
less adoring disciples. It would be possible to exaggerate the 
effects of this isolation. Bentham had a pretty shrewd notion 
of what was going on in the world of affairs, and he shows 
everywhere a keen and ironic sense for — more particularly — 
the irrational side of human nature, especially the human 
nature of lawyers and politicians. But in many ways he re- 
mained nevertheless all his life curiously naive. To this it is 
to be added that he was naturally a man of limited sympathy 



Jeremy Bentham 51 

and insight — a limitation left uncorrected by a wide human 
experience. He liad a marvellously precise, clear mind, which 
took delight in what ordinarily men find extremely dreary — 
the work of analyzing, classifying, drawing fine distinctions, 
codifying; Bentham might be defined, one of his biographers 
says, as a codifying animal. But he was deficient both in 
warmth and in depth; not only was he himself not moved by 
enthusiasms, strong feeling, uncalculating impulse, but he was 
entirely unable to understand such motives in other men, and, 
save as a matter of pathology, ignored them in his theories. 

These limitations show conspicuously in the ethical theory 
with which Bentham's name is connected. This theory as 
understood by him is very simple. "Nature has placed man- 
kind under the governance of two sovereign masters — pain 
and pleasure." Pleasure is the only good, pain the only evil; 
and so the consequences in terms of these are what determine 
the goodness or badness of an act. The proper ethical atti- 
tude is accordingly one of calculation — reckoning up the pleas- 
urable and painful consequences, striking the balance, and de- 
ciding for the side which shows the surplus; and the miost vir- 
tuous man is he who calculates most successfully. Bentham 
thought this capable of taking a mathematical form, and it 
was indeed his great aim as an ethicist to work out a calculus 
of pleasure that should afford scientific guidance to conduct. 
The primarily self-seeking character of human nature is frankly 
granted. "Dream not that men will move their little finger 
to save you unless their advantage in so doing is obvious to 
them"; or again, taking the whole of life together "there exists 
not, nor ever can exist^ that human being in whose instance any 
public interest he can have will not in so far as depends upon 
himself have been sacrificed to his own personal interest." 
Among the pleasures which men feel are indeed to be reck- 
oned those of sympathy, which may lead us to acts that bene- 
fit our fellows; and since our happiness is so dependent on 
the good will of others, practical wisdom would urge us to 



52 English and American Philosophy 

cultivate and strengthen this. But sympathy is naturally weak, 
and can seldom hold its own in competition with more personal 
claims; and in any case it is only as a source of pleasure to 
ourselves that it constitutes a motive. For duty, as something 
set over against self-interest, Bentham's system finds no place; 
if the word "ought" be admissible at all, he remarks, it "ought" 
to be banished from the vocabulary of morals. In its original 
and proper sense, duty is simply that which the law will punish 
me if I fail to do; or, in a secondary sense which Bentham 
identifies with "moral" duty, it borrows its force from the vari- 
ous mortifications that come to one who has gained the ill-will 
of the general public, and from the pleasures of a good repu- 
tation. The business of the moralist, therefore, is not to 
preach to the vicious man his duties; since vice is only a mis- 
calculation, we should prove to him that the immoral action is 
against his self-interest, and show how erroneous an estimate 
he makes of pleasures and pains. The final criterion of con- 
duct is, to be sure, not any particular man's pleasure, but 
the pleasure of the social whole; and just how we get the 
right to make this transition the ethical critic will need to 
scrutinize carefully. It is undoubtedly a very weak joint 
in the Utilitarian armor. But at any rate Bentham did not 
hold that the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" was 
to be enforced as a mysterious ultimate truth, dependent on 
disinterested motives. Its practical sanction is entirely definite 
and imideal; it consists in specific rewards, namely, which so- 
ciety attaches to the things that make for the general good, 
and in penalties affixed to anti-social acts. 

3. It does not need much argument to show that the con- 
ception of human nature which this implies is inadequate to 
the facts. The sense of personal honor, the respect for settled 
ideals of character, the appeal which good taste and the aes- 
thetic beauty of righteousness make to us, indeed most of the 
finer fruits of moral development, escape the net of Bentham's 
mathematical calculation of pleasures and pains. Neverthe- 



Jeremy Bentham 53 

less this after all affects but slightly the peculiar value of his 
work; in some degree it may even be a merit for his special 
purpose. For while Utilitarianism, it is true, is on one side a 
hedonistic theory of life for the individual man, it is not as such 
that Bentham is mainly interested in it, but as a program, 
rather, of legal and political reform. And from the standpoint 
of the reformer, many of the difficulties which beset Utili- 
tarianism as a theoretical ethics have only a minor impor- 
tance. So for example the transition from egoistic to univer- 
salistic good. For ethics this is a fundamental problem; why 
should a man, unless he happens to feel like it, adopt as his 
motto the greatest happiness of the greatest number, rather 
than the greatest happiness of number one? It may be that, as 
in Bentham's own case, he is so constituted that he gets most 
pleasure for himself by disinterested public service, and then 
for him the particular problem will not exist; but there seems 
no reason why he should plume himself morally on this 
account. But now if the formula is primarily intended to 
serve as a guide to the legislator and lawmaker, no transition 
is called for. We are already concerned here, not with what 
a man sets up as his personal end, but with what impartial 
reason dictates as good for men as members of society. And 
from this standpoint there is no inconsistency — and on the 
whole it represents the fact — in saying that pleasure and 
pain are the comprehensive human motives. At least they are 
the things on which the law has to rely in order to restrain 
wrongdoers; if, or in so far as, people are actuated by more 
disinterested and ideal motives, there is no need for laws and 
judges. It is no doubt desirable that moral actions should 
be the natural expression of an inner moral disposition; but 
it is the first business of the legislator to get external results, 
and not to develop character. 

And the method of legislation is in large degree just Ben- 
tham's calculus. Whatever may be true of the personal life, 
the lawmaker has little option in the matter; his only recourse 



54 English and American Philosophy 

is to a methodic balancing of the particular gains and losses 
which a proposed measure may be expected to occasion. So 
also of the end in view; it is only by testing laws and institu- 
tions in terms of specific facts of human welfare — the actual 
happiness or unhappiness of individual human beings — that we 
avoid the risk of turning our principles into "vague general- 
ities." If indeed a man wishes to guide his own life by the light 
of his inner feelings of approval, Bentham raises no particular 
objection; in fact he allows the possibility that as a matter 
of theory such feelings may play a necessary part. The recog- 
nition of the claims of utility itself is after all a case of ap- 
proval. But when we set out to coerce our neighbors, at any 
rate, we need a more objective standard than that of private 
feeling or opinion; and to the central importance of this last 
consideration Bentham expressly subordinates all others. Much 
the same thing may be remarked of another special aspect of 
his hedonistic theory. Bentham insists that, since pleasure is 
the sole end, consequences, and never motives, are the objects 
of the moral judgment; a motive in itself is always good, since 
the only motive is the desire for pleasure, and pleasure cannot 
be otherwise than good. And this has plausibility, again, when 
we translate it into its practical equivalent ; alike for the social 
critic, and for the judge who administers the law, the imputa- 
tion of motives is far less useful than an investigation of the 
actual results of conduct, since not only is the former likely 
to entangle the issue in personalities, but in any case motives 
are for the most part only to be guessed at. 

4. Bentham had started out as a Tory, with an optimistic 
confidence that in order to enlist the cooperation of responsible 
statesmen, and to get reforms accomplished, it was only neces- 
sary to show their reasonableness. Experience however had 
resulted in the discovery that reason is not the only force in 
politics — a conclusion which his own theories of human nature 
might have suggested sooner. To prepare the way for the 
Utilitarian program it was therefore necessary to reconstruct 



James Milt 55 

government itself; and this led to the second main article of 
his creed. The problem was in substance this: how are we to 
get rid of "sinister interests" — private and class interests, that 
is, in men in authority, hostile to the general welfare? On 
Bentham's own showing all men are fundamentally selfish; and 
as everyone loves power and wealth, he will, if he is set in 
authority over others, naturally and necessarily exploit them 
for his selfish ends. The only radical remedy, therefore, is to 
remove the distinction between rulers and ruled, by investing 
sovereignty in the people themselves. A pure democracy is 
indeed in modem times impossible; but by letting people choose 
their representatives, and then binding these representatives 
so closely as to give them no opportunity to betray their mas- 
ters, an approximate identity of interest can be secured. The 
political ideal of the Utilitarians therefore lay, first in the di- 
rection of extending the ballot, and then in originating devices 
that should subject representatives as strictly as possible to 
popular control. 

5. It was to James Mill, Bentham's most able disciple, 
that the elaboration and carrying out of this political theory 
was more especially due. Although not himself in Parliament, 
— he was an employee of the East India Company, — by his 
pen, and even more by his personal advice and conversation, 
he furnished direction and motive power to those more closely 
in touch with the practical situation. Personally Mill was 
not an attractive man, and in his character the deficiencies of 
the rationalistic type display themselves even in aggravated 
form. He was able to make few allowances for those who dis- 
agreed with him on fundamentals, and an air of unpleasant 
dogmatism pervades his utterances. Bentham remarked 
that Mill argued against oppression less because he loved the 
oppressed than because he hated the oppressing few; and if 
this means that a dislike of abstract injustice and unreason 
was more powerful with him than concrete human sympathies, 
it bears all the evidence of truth. But if he was able to call 



56 English and American Philosophy 

forth little love even from a favorite son, he was abundantly 
able to inspire respect; and by sheer force of character and 
intellect he came to be one of the most powerful influences of 
his day. 

6. For philosophy, Mill's significance lies chiefly in the fact 
that it is he who worked out most consistently and thoroughly 
the association psychology which constitutes the theoretical 
foundation for the Utilitarian movement — a service which does 
not lose its value even though the attempt resulted in bringing 
into relief the limitations of the sensationalistic method. It 
is obvious that our experience convej^s to us, in actually living 
it, a totally different impression from that complex of atomic 
sensations to which by Mill it is reduced. There is a unity 
to it, a significance, a sense of active and creative participa- 
tion, a relationship to purposes individual and social, which 
has evaporated in the results of the associationists. For these 
results one has to adopt a secondary and more or less artificial 
point of view — that of a retrospective analysis into simple ele- 
ments, which are then supposed to precede the actually ex- 
perienced complexities, and to generate these by their combina- 
tion. The association school deals with its objects in the 
same way as does the physical scientist; indeed it is all the 
time using physical and chemical analogies to explain the way 
in which ideas come together. Within limits there is no ob- 
jection to this ; but it is likely to lead us to forget that there is 
another and inner point of view which we also cannot help 
adopting on occasion, and that with this more immediate ex- 
perience the results of an objective analysis do not always coin- 
cide, if indeed they ever do completely. Indeed the Utili- 
tarians grant as much. Ideas are held in certain cases to fol- 
low one another so quickly — with the "rapidity of lightning" — 
as to form compounds that seem quite different from the com- 
ponent elements. But this contrast between seeming and re- 
ality, which has an easy meaning in connection with the world 
of physical facts, needs justification when applied to the psy- 



James Mill 57 

chological realm, where in some sense the appearance is the 
real. If I have a feeling which is felt as so and so, what right 
have I to say that it really is something quite different? When 
I stop to examine it it changes, and so the new state may be 
different; but the earlier one was, it may naturally be claimed, 
just what it was felt to be. 

But even as a matter of analysis Mill's results are not indis- 
putable, particularly when we come to deal with those more 
subtle and elusive constituents of experience describable as 
feelings of transition or relationship. Mill is determined to 
reduce everything to the more apparently substantial and 
steady nuclei in the stream of experience to which we give the j 
name sensation, and to overlook the equal though less tangible 
reality of the links between them. If however from the con- 
crete experience of recognizing two sensations in temporal 
succession we abstract the sensations, and regard them in their 
separateness, we are entitled to do the same thing for the feeling 
of temporal transition also, since this is equally an aspect of the 
original fact. And with the recognition of relations, that uni- 
fied and purposive character that seems to belong to first-hand 
experience has no need to be overlooked, particularly as, since 
Mill's day, this has received a very substantial backing in the 
science of biology; the conception of an organism, and of or- 
ganic ends, not only gives point to, but renders necessary in 
some fashion, the introduction of ends into psychology also. 
For Mill, "desire" is strictly interchangeable with the mere 
"idea of a pleasure," and the term "instinct" is in all cases 
only a name for "nothing but our ignorance"; to appeal to in- 
stinct is simply to confess our failure in tracing the phe- 
nomena of the mind to the grand comprehensive principle of 
association. But it is about the conception of instinct that the 
later tendencies in psychology largely center; and they force 
us to take the facts of the mental life not simply as atomic 
elements to be grouped by association, but as aspects of a 
living and continuous process. Mill has done very nearly all 



58 English and American Philosophy 

that it is humanly possible to do with the data of isolated 
sensations and their sequences; but the more rigorous he makes 
his analysis, the clearer it becomes that the endeavor to ex- 
plain the life of conduct in terms of separate feelings breaks 
down of its own weight. 

7, There are thus two serious weaknesses in the associa- 
tion psychology as worked out by Mill — on the one hand the 
absence of a recognition of any "activity" of the self, or the 
organism, in building up the structure of experience, and on 
the other, or "content" side, the endeavor to get along without 
specific facts of "relationship." First, to dwell a little further 
on this latter point. The method which Mill uses to avoid the 
recognition of anything specifically different from sensation 
may be illustrated by his discussion of "relative terms." What 
do we mean here by the relation as such? Simply, Mill replies, 
a relative name. Thus the relation of fathership and sonship 
is merely the fact that father and son are the two termini of 
a single series of associated objects or sensations to which we 
assign a name; but then we forget the sensational character 
of the fact, turn the name into an abstraction, and suppose as a 
consequence that we are dealing with a new fact, or a "rela- 
tion." 

But now if we try to represent to ourselves the nature of 
this "train," and ask how it came to be formed in the first 
place, it becomes apparent that there already are simpler re- 
lations to be found internal to it, apart from which it would 
disintegrate completely; and to give any intelligible account 
of these more ultimate relations which does not presuppose them 
to begin with, is a task that strains even Mill's ingenuity. Take 
for example the terms "like" and "unlike." These represent, 
Mill writes, the part in the process of sensation which con- 
sists in distinguishing one sensation as one, another as another, 
and for this it is only necessary that we have the sensations; 
having two sensations, and knowing that they are two, are one 
and the same thing. But it seems evident that if this is taken 



James Mill 59 

as it stands, it is not true; if my sole data are two facts, — a 
red and a green sensation, say, — the two would always be as 
disparate as the feeling I have today is from the feeling I may 
have a year hence. What Mill really substitutes for the two 
self-identical sensations is the experience of change from one 
sensation to another. Now it may reasonably be maintained 
that, if there is a sense in which knowing that I have a pain 
can be defined as meaning nothing different from having or 
feeling the pain, so having a change of sensation, and knowing 
that I have it, are also not two things, but one and the same 
thing. But this experience of change is something more than 
two separate sensations. It is, as Mill himself calls it, a 
process of sensation, with red and green the termini of the 
process simply; while the intervening stage of "unlikeness" 
is expressly distinguished as not a distinct sensation. But then 
must it not be something different from a sensation — that is, 
a relation? That, in other words, which enables us here to 
speak of a train or process is, not, as in the case of father and 
son, other intervening sensations or images, but just the con- 
necting link of relationship itself; and through this alone it 
comes about that we have something more than a mere series. 
Thus Mill's thesis that the relation of unlikeness is nothing 
but a name for pairs of sensations is really abandoned for the 
more defensible theory that unlikeness is a new element in 
a process of sensational change, and the empirical proof of 
his doctrine reduces itself simply to the claim that relations 
between sensations must be given somehow as factors in im- 
mediate experience, instead of having an extra-experiential 
source; the identification of the "process" with an experience 
which does not contain the specific feeling of difference, but 
is made up of bare sensational parts that are different purely 
as a matter of fact, is only a confusion. A similar comment is 
to be made upon Mill's treatment of succession, which is a 
slightly more complex relation involving, in addition to a 
change from one sensation to another, the presence of an 



6o English and American Philosophy 

idea of the prior one. "In the succession of ideas A, and B, 
priority is not the name of A, it is the name of that part of 
the compound process which consists of knowing A as the first 
of the two" — ^here the appeal to the idea of succession to en- 
able us to get along without such a specific relation is almost 
undisguised.^ 

8. The same unwillingness to accept relations as ultimate 
underlies the whole doctrine of the concept, or class idea. The 
notion of ''man" is evidently not the sort of particular image, 
or copy of a sensation, which Mill's philosophy alone can ac- 
cept as real; what are we then to make of it? A general idea, 
Mill replies, is an aggregation of an indefinite number of indi- 
viduals by their association with a particular name. For the 
sake of economy, the same name is applied by us to a number 
of — we will say — black objects. With the gradual strength- 
ening of the association these particular instances of black are 
at last called up by the name in such rapid succession, that 
they appear commingled; and in this way black turns from an 
individual into a general name. This is clearly a tour de force, 
quite unverifiable, and far from plausible in itself; but in any 
case it will hardly work apart from an appeal to relation. For 
unless there were already some perception of resemblance be- 
tween various black objects, there would be nothing to ac- 
count for the application to them of the same name; and con- 
sequently language, instead of accounting for the universal, pre- 
supposes it at least in an implicit form. 

As association fails to be a sufficient explanation of the gen- 
eral idea, so does it also in the case of memory. To our natural 
thought, memory appears clearly to involve an immediate ref- 
erence to an actual past which lies outside any experience now 
existing — an analysis which Mill's sole reliance on association 
makes it impossible for him to accept. Such a transcendence, 
therefore, he is bound to resolve into a group of associated 

^Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, Chap. XIV, Sec. 
II, pp. IO-22, 79-82. 



James Mill 6i 

images. Accordingly memory is made to consist in a present 
sensation or idea — the remembering self — which calls up by 
association, so rapidly that they run as it were into a single 
point of consciousness, the various intermediate stages in a 
series at the other end of which is the experience remembered 
— the past self, — memory thus standing as a complex idea 
made up of these two selves and of the intermediate states 
of consciousness. Now here we have, to be sure, all the constit- 
uent ideas present in experience together, or very nearly to- 
gether; but it seems to have done us not much good in the 
way of accounting for the knowledge of a real past. For 
if a present revived image does not get us beyond itself, no 
more does a present group of images coalescing in a compound. 
The whole verisimilitude of the theory results from illicitly 
presupposing that this revived chain of images loses its mere 
status of present existence, and informs us that it is a revival 
of an actual past now lying beyond any possible experiences 
of ours ; and this is just the thing we set out to explain. 

9. In the case of memory, then, we are already in contact 
with a fact of consciousness which it is difficult to reduce to the 
mere passive presence of conscious content, and where the 
reference to an active belief seems necessary in order to fill 
out the analysis of our experience. Belief has, accordingly, also 
to be analyzed into sensation or association. Now belief, ac- 
cording to Mill, is in the first instance nothing but the pres- 
ence of sensation; to have a sensation, and to believe that we 
have it, are indistinguishable. Even of belief in a present fact 
of consciousness this is a doubtful thesis; belief is a case 
of judgment, and is not properly to be identified with the 
mere felt sense of realness. But in any case we cannot stop 
with such a definition. It would lead us to the conclusion that 
an idea has only to be present in the mind to be believed ; and 
as Mill does not allow that there is any reality for us that 
is not so present, this would leave no room for unbelief, though 
it is easy to imagine a thing without believing it. 



62 English and American Philosophy 

In the endeavor to explain this difference between belief 
and imagination, and at the same time to take some account 
of the normal function of belief in appearing to carry us 
beyond a mere present state of consciousness, Mill appeals 
again to the law of association; belief, namely, is a strong as- 
sociation, as imagination is a relatively weak one. But the at- 
tempt to dispense with the distinctive character of belief is 
successful for neither purpose. At best association can, on 
Mill's terms, only account for what we shall believe, and, pos- 
sibly, for "necessity" or permanence in belief; to explain the 
believing attitude itself, we still have nothing to fall back 
on except the former identification of belief with the existence 
of a mental content. And then it makes no difference whether 
an image is brought into the mind by a strong association or 
a weak one; so long as it is there, no reason appears why we 
should not believe it. Nor, in the second place, will associa- 
tion take us outside the bare associated ideas as present facts 
of consciousness; while even if we agree with Mill that belief 
in an external object means only the assurance that under cer- 
tain conditions I have received, and will receive again, the 
group of sensations which constitute the object, we already, 
in memory and in anticipation, are presupposing a belief in 
what lies beyond the range of existent mental content. As a 
matter of fact, men actually mean more than this by the exist- 
ence of an object, as Mill's own language cannot avoid imply- 
ing. When he tells us for example that belief in the existence 
of an object means that if there be sentient organs, at such a 
time and place, there will be such and such sensations, his re- 
duction of the universe to sensations has already been left far 
behind ; if I can presuppose myself as a physical organism mov- 
ing about in a spatial world, the existence of such a world of 
course no longer is in question. Mill shifts back and forth 
between the two incompatible notions — that objects are only 
a certain number of sensations regarded as in a particular state 
of combination, and that this order of sensations is itself de- 



James Mill 63 

rived from objects in nature. But in either case, once more, 
the fact of a belief in something not now present as an experi- 
ence is there to be explained. 

10. It is worth while noticing again, before leaving Mill, 
that the association doctrine has its chief meaning and im- 
portance for the Utilitarians not as a psychological theory, but 
for its practical consequences. It was in the first place a weapon 
to be used against the rival school of intuitionalism. "The 
notion," says John Stuart Mill, "that truths external to the 
mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independ- 
ently of observation or experience, is, I am persuaded, in these 
times the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad 
institutions. By the aid of this theory every inveterate belief 
and every intense feeling of which the origin is not remembered 
is enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by 
reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient voucher and 
justification. There never was such an instrument devised for 
consecrating all deep-seated prejudices." To show that all 
such beliefs are capable of being reduced to particular con- 
nections of ideas, and have therefore in them nothing sacred 
or compelling, is the first service that the association philosophy 
conceived itself to be performing. But besides this negative 
value, the doctrine has another and more positive one. If 
early association can produce the intense conviction which we 
now observe in undesirable beliefs, then, if rightly controlled, 
it might be equally effective in leading to a more salutary 
issue. It has very generally been objected to schemes of social 
regeneration that they may be ideally desirable, but that they 
are impracticable so long as human nature remains what it is. 
Very well, the Utilitarian might reply; but what is human 
nature? A complex of particular associations of ideas. But 
these you can easily conceive changed. Accordingly the as- 
sociation theory points to one ultimate panacea for human 
ills — Education. Education properly conducted is capable of 
almost anything; and society has therefore in its own hands 



64 English and American Philosophy 

the power of creating the social material to make possible 
its ideals of social justice. 

II. It is easy to understand that the Utilitarian type of 
mind had no great use for religion. Of historical religion it 
unfortunately is true that too often it has been exploited in 
the interests of oppression; and even when not consciously so 
used, its tendency appeared to the Utilitarians to be in this 
direction. It exalts the virtues of obedience, and of a patient 
endurance of evils as the will of God, rather than the critical 
and militant spirit with which Utilitarianism was identified. 
"My father's rejection of all that is called religious belief," 
J, S. Mill writes in his Autobiography, "was not, as one might 
suppose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence. His aversion 
to religion was of the same kind with that of Lucretius; he re- 
garded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, 
but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest 
enemy of morality, first by setting up fictitious excellencies — • 
belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not con- 
nected with the good of human kind, — and causing them to 
be accepted for genuine virtues; but above all by radically 
vitiating the standard of morals, making it consist in doing the 
will of a Being on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of 
adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently 
hateful. I have a hundred times heard him say that all ages 
and nations have represented their Gods as wicked in a con- 
stantly increasing progression, that mankind have gone on 
adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect con- 
ception of wickedness which the human mind can devise, and 
have called this God and prostrated themselves before it." 

§ 2. John Stuart Mill 

I. John Stuart Mill, the oldest son of James Mill, is, all 
things considered, the most interesting product of the Utili- 
tarian movement. He is interesting alike for the voluntary 



/. 5. Mill 65 

and for the involuntary part he played in it; the theory that 
a child can be trained to be that which his teachers wish him 
to be has seldom had so searching a test. Mill emerged 
a highly serious and, as he himself confessed, even priggish 
young man, with his vitality unduly drained, but with a fund 
of knowledge that put him years ahead of his contemporaries, 
and a mind that worked with extraordinary precision as a 
logical machine. He took his place almost at once in the radical 
movement as a worthy successor of his father. 

Mill however was hardly embarked upon his career when 
he was called upon to undergo an experience that left lasting 
effects on his intellectual character. The crisis — it might very 
well be called his conversion — occurred when he was about 
twenty years old. In a condition of nervous exhaustion the 
zest of life suddenly left him, and the humanitarian ends in 
whose service he was enlisted lost their charm; and while in 
this mood it occurred to him to question the basis of the phi- 
losophy which he had hitherto accepted on trust. He now 
saw, or thought he saw, that the very truth of the association 
theory was likely to jeopardize the practical consequences which 
alone made it valuable. The whole hope of the world lay in 
building up opinions and interests through association; but on 
the other hand the habit of analysis which constituted the 
method of Utilitarianism was all the while tending to undo the 
very ties it was most desirable to strengthen. To be sure, con- 
nections of ideas will not be affected if they are natural, and 
not external and artificial; but what are these natural con- 
nections according to the Utilitarians? Primarily the organic 
and physical ones; and of the entire insufficiency of these to 
make life really desirable Mill had full conviction. To exalt 
them alone to a place of security was to reduce life to the mere 
exercise of a selfish and uninspired prudence, and to under- 
mine all the nobler feelings and virtues. 

Gradually the power of feeling and of enjoyment returned to 
Mill; but the experience had had the effect of very notably 



66 English and American Philosophy 

enlarging his sympathies, especially in the way of opening his 
eyes to the value of a more inner and ideal culture than Ben- 
tham's narrow and prosaic scheme of life allowed for. The 
reading of Wordsworth had proved his best medicine during 
the crisis; and Wordsworth had shown him that feelings have 
an importance which cannot be ignored in the interests of an 
unimpassioned exercise of the intellect, that they are rooted 
in the natural man, and supply just the perennial source of 
happiness which scientific analysis cannot destroy. And this 
deeper sense of spiritual values which Mill brought to the ra- 
tionalistic logic of the older Utilitarians gives him a special 
significance, as a connecting link between the earlier and the 
later parts of the century. Mill's type of mind always retained 
indeed peculiarities that lessen the range of its appeal. He is 
lacking in expansiveness and animal spirits, in obvious en- 
thusiasms, and, in general, in the qualities that strike forcibly 
the popular imagination. Habitually he is inclined to take 
things with a degree of seriousness that is slightly overstrained, 
and to subordinate too much the normal interests of living 
to the demands of the reforming spirit. But with this lack 
of emotional impressiveness is connected, on the other hand, 
the special merit to which he can lay claim. An ingrained fair- 
mindedness and reasonableness, a preference for clear think- 
ing over rhetoric, a respect for qualified statements as against 
extreme and one-sided ones, and an impersonal desire to get at 
the precise fact, and to recognize all the difficulties in the way 
before taking sides, while it is not a showy or a widely popular 
state of mind, has its decided merits. Mill was aware of the 
specialized character of his own gifts, as appears in his letters to 
Carlyle in particular. He is rather fitted to be a logical ex- 
pounder than an artist; and it is only in the hands of the 
artist and the seer that truth becomes impressive, and a liv- 
ing principle of action. But he consoles himself with the 
thought that there is nevertheless a useful function left for 
one who shall translate the mystical insight of others into the 



/. S. Mill 67 

language of argument and logic, and thus extend the range of 
its appeal. 

2 . Although they are not logically the most fundamental, it 
will be convenient in considering Mill to start from the social 
and industrial interests that more and more came to occupy 
his attention. Back of many of the aspects of the social prob- 
lem in the nineteenth century, lies a fundamental conflict in 
point of view. Broadly speaking, it is the difference between 
the man who exalts the part which organized society, or the 
state, is to play in social regeneration, and the one who thinks 
that the state always muddles things when it interferes, and 
who looks for the best results therefore from a policy which 
allows each individual to work out his own salvation under 
conditions of free competition. Now the second, or laissez- 
faire attitude, gets a special theoretical justification in the 
political economy which the Utilitarians adopted as orthodox. 
Adam Smith had already, in his Wealth of Nations, pointed 
out the fallacies underlying the common assumption that na- 
tional prosperity is a thing that governments can create by 
arbitrary interferences with the processes of trade. Such 
a doctrine the Utilitarians were prepared to receive even apart 
from the persuasiveness of Smith's argument. Their experience 
as reformers naturally would make them suspicious of an 
agency capable of going wrong in such a multiplicity of ways, 
and they were disposed accordingly to restrict the functions 
of the state; a fear of power in the hands of rulers was in- 
deed the starting point of their whole political creed. Theo- 
retically also there is a presumption against state interfer- 
ence; as a punishing agency — and the sanction of govern- 
ment is primarily its command of penalties — the state makes 
use of pain, and pain in the Utilitarian philosophy is always 
an evil. It may be necessary for other ends, but it is a 
necessary evil; and so the more we can eliminate it the better. 

Limited to the field of industrial and commercial enterprise, 
the laissez-faire doctrine may conceivably be true. If it is 



68 English and American Philosophy 

a question how to amass the greatest amount of material 
wealth, possibly the best way may be to leave every avenue 
open, and let the best man win. But there is nothing in the 
nature of the case to prevent such a result, even if it came 
about, from being coincident with a pronounced poverty in 
many elements that contribute to the real and substantial 
happiness of a nation. Great wealth need not mean equitably 
distributed wealth. It may be consistent with a great mass of 
suffering, with hard and grinding conditions of labor, with 
the lowering of ethical ideals and a substitution of the morals 
of an unfeeling and selfish competition. For the Utilitarians, 
however, inclined always to press their logic to an extreme, and 
naturally deficient in a spontaneous human sympathy, the 
laissez-faire philosophy seemed to be the last word in the 
solution of the industrial problem. And consequently when 
the center of the problem shifted from the middle class to 
the worker, the orthodox political economy crystallized into 
a form which stood in the way of needed social changes, and 
was used to bolster up industrial oppression and injustice 
as real as the political injustice against which the party had 
been enlisted. Even so elementary a principle of social good 
as the regulation of the labor of children and of women had 
to fight the economists for its recognition. There was not on 
the whole any hostility to the working classes; on the con- 
trary, the Utilitarians honestly were interested in the good of 
all. It was assumed that prosperity would filter down auto- 
matically to the lower orders, who could look for any sub- 
stantial benefit only to the class above them. James Mill, 
for example, takes for granted that the middle class is self- 
evidently the natural leader and benefactor of the working- 
man; and he deplores the sad case of the inhabitants of 
manufacturing communities with whose "afflictions there is 
no virtuous family of the middle rank to sympathize, and whose 
children have no good example of such a family to see and 
admire." Nevertheless there was among the economists an 



/. S. Mill 69 

unfortunate appearance, at least, of a lack of sympathy for 
the aspirations of the laborer himself, which the temper of the 
t5^ical Utilitarian was not calculated to remove. 

And meanwhile several of the most distinctive doctrines of 
the new school might well appear devised of set purpose to 
take away from the laborer any hope of a real and permanent 
advance. There was first the famous doctrine connected with 
the name of Malthus. Malthus had pointed out that progress 
is conditioned by a commonplace but very important physical 
and economic law. Food products increase at a rate less rapid 
than the natural increase of population. The result is that 
if there were nothing to hinder, the race would soon outgrow 
its ability to secure maintenance, and universal distress would 
follow. What has in the past prevented this scarcity is the 
very state of affairs that the reformers were trying to change. 
War, vice, pestilence and disease have cut down the natural 
increase, and so kept the race from starvation; but in pro- 
portion as these checks are abolished the danger grows. 

The consequences that Malthus himself drew from his 
Law of Population are not wholly unambiguous. Certainly 
a natural impression that one is likely to get from his first 
statement of it, is that poverty and its attendant evils are 
irremediable, and that "from the inevitable laws of our nature 
some human beings must suffer from want" — those unhappy 
persons "who in the great lottery of life have drawn a blank." 
In a later edition he shows himself less obtuse to the case that 
can be made out for the humanitarians, and leaves a not un- 
favorable impression of a tempered goodness of heart well 
under the control of the intellect. To moral restraints he 
comes to assign larger possibilities in the way of modifying the 
law than had at first appeared, even if he does not grow en- 
thusiastic over the prospect. Indeed if it be so — and his 
success in bringing this home to men's minds is Malthus' 
most solid claim to remembrance — that progress is throughout 
dependent on the material foundations of life, the recognition 



/' 



70 English and American Philosophy 

of the law may even be a message of encouragement; as Mill 
points out, if we once see where the responsibility lies for the 
slowness of our progress in the past, we are in a better posi- 
tion to supply the remedy. But nevertheless the first effect of 
the doctrine, particularly in the mouth of one who has more 
confidence in the compelling power of the law than in the 
chance that men will show enough intelligence to evade it, 
will naturally be to chill the ardor of the enthusiast for 
progress. 

The appearance of hostility to the interests of the working 
class was increased by the application of Malthusianism to 
the special problem of the distribution of wealth. The eco- 
nomic laws which under free competition govern the distribution 
of the proceeds of industry in its various forms, and which 
were first formulated by David Ricardo, were very generally 
interpreted in a way which made them practically a demon- 
stration of the impossibility of any large benefiting of con- 
ditions. The so-called wage-fund theory, as commonly under- 
stood, amounted to saying that the amount of capital avail- 
able for the payment of wages is to all intents and purposes a 
fixed sum, and that consequently the power to increase wages 
is strictly limited. Really the only feasible way is by lessen- 
ing the number of individuals among whom the division is to 
be made. But here Malthus' doctrine comes in again. Sup>- 
pose for any reason the number of workmen is decreased, and 
wages rise. Prosperity will remove the bars to over-population. 
Working men will marry earlier, and have larger families; 
and so inevitably their numbers will increase, and wages will 
once more fall. Of course the economists recognized that this 
simplified the situation somewhat unduly; still there was 
real ground for the feeling that, so far as it lay in the power 
of their science, they were sentencing the workers as a class 
to perpetual poverty, and reprehending as treason to the laws 
of nature their efforts to escape. 

3. In connection with his treatment of the industrial and 



/. 5'. Mill 71 

economic problem, accordingly, Mill's wider human sympathy 
had a large opportunity to make itself felt. His starting point 
is still very definitely from individualism; but it is an indi- 
vidualism which shows a sense for the concrete realities of 
men's lives that is lacking in the earlier Utilitarians. Liberty 
for them had meant, primarily, either the liberty to exercise 
the formal right of free and equal citizenship, or the liberty 
to conduct one's business as one pleased; and in both cases 
there were implicit certain consequences not entirely favor- 
able to the concrete freedom of the common man. The ten- 
dency of laissez-faire, it has appeared, was more immediately 
to the advantage of the few than of the many; and even Ben- 
tham's Utilitarianism does not point to an unambiguous issue. 
It is a question whether his theory of the law as a school- 
master placed over men to bring their natural selfishness into 
line with ideals of social welfare — provided the Utilitarian 
philosopher has the say as to what these ideals shall be — 
does not have in it a leaning toward paternalism; in more re- 
cent times, the greatest happiness principle has indeed been 
widely utilized to give "society" an autocratic power. And 
with that sense of the worth of liberty as a fundamental con- 
dition of human good which gets historical expression in the 
theory of "natural rights," Bentham was wholly out of sym- 
pathy. With Mill, on the other hand, liberty is first of all 
an intimate and personal value. "To me it seems," he 
writes in his Diary, "that nothing can be so alien and (to 
coin a word) antipathetic to the modern mind as Goethe's 
ideal of life. . . . Not symmetry, but bold, free expansion 
in all directions is demanded by the needs of modem life and 
the instincts of the modern mind." In his Essay on Liberty, 
in particular, the importance of having a character which does 
not take its hue from prevailing opinion, and of living fear- 
lessly to suit oneself rather than one's neighbors, is urged with 
an enthusiasm and eloquence which evidently does not get 
its sole motivation from the considerations of utility which he 



^2 English and American Philosophy 

adduces, and which sometimes even threatens to endanger 
these latter. 

When, therefore, Mill comes to the economic problem, the 
mere name of liberty does not blind him to the fact that 
freedom from business restrictions does not necessarily mean 
freedom of life; and he is prepared to modify individualistic 
claims substantially through a recognition that the abstract 
form of liberty is not a substitute for actual benefits received. 
On the whole, accordingly, he may be counted as one of the 
protagonists of that broader conception of economic science 
which admits the bearing of an ideal of social justice on the 
law of supply and demand. For Mill, the true end of so- 
cial improvement is to "fit men for a state of society com- 
bining the greatest personal freedom with that just distribu- 
tion of the fruits of labor which the present laws of property do 
not even propose to aim at"; and in the interests of this he 
was led to approve of a degree of political interference with 
industrial laissez-faire that went much beyond the traditional 
sympathies of his associates. He did not himself consider 
this, however, as a denial of Utilitarian principles, but rather 
as supplementing them; he would extend the functions of gov- 
ernment not to restrict, but to enlarge men's opportunities. 
The advocates of laissez-faire had conceived the "perfection 
of human society to have been reached if man could be com- 
pelled to abstain from injuring man, not considering that men 
need help as well as forbearance, and that nature is to the 
greater number a severer taskmaster than man is to man." 
So long as men need aid, not to bolster up incapacity, but to 
"enable them afterwards to help themselves," there is no 
theoretical ground for refusing it. Again, law may rightly step 
in when the purpose is, not to determine the practices of trade, 
but to give effect to a general desire by guaranteeing that 
selfish individuals shall not nullify it through a cut-throat com- 
petition. And law may be necessary, also, to overcome the 
artificial advantages that accrue to excessive accumulations of 



/. 5. Mill 73 

wealth, and to diminish the consequent inequalities of op>- 
portunity; Mill is considerably in advance even of present 
day practice in his acceptance of the right of society to ap- 
propriate the unearned increment, and even to abolish private 
property in land, and in his proposals for directly regulating, 
by an inheritance tax and otherwise, the size of private for- 
tunes. Even for socialism Mill shows a surprising tolerance 
and sympathy when one considers his intellectual antecedents, 
though on the whole he inclines to think that changes less 
radical will be sufficient, and more consistent with a maxi- 
mum amount of human liberty and spontaneity. With uni- 
versal education, and a due limitation of the numbers of the 
community, — to Mill the Law of Population continues to stand 
as the most serious obstacle to the hopes of the workingman, — 
he thinks that even under present institutions it would be 
possible in a very short time to eliminate poverty. Two things 
in particular he came to regard as having great hope for the 
future, one the enfranchisement of women, a measure of 
whose political and social value he had an exaggerated notion, 
and the other the promotion of cooperative enterprises. 

4. In political theory also. Mill inclines to qualify, in a dif- 
ferent direction, his original individualism, and so to modify 
the political radicalism of his predecessors. Bentham had 
been impressed only with the danger that results from the 
interference of a ruling class with freedom; he had scarcely 
noticed that a tyranny of the majority is also possible. 
Throughout his life this worried Mill greatly. In the first 
instance the reason seems to have been due to his positive 
concern for individuality, and to a fear lest the average man 
should be too ready to enforce average and conventional rules 
of living. But combined with this, and bulking much larger 
in his political results, there is also the less democratic motive 
of a distrust of popular intelligence. As a consequence of this, 
he found himself out of sympathy with Bentham's interest in 
devising expedients for subjecting legislators to the immediate 



74 English and American Philosophy 

wishes of their constituents. Rather, the aim of politics should 
be to leave the more competent to apply their knowledge to 
the work of government without continual interference, though 
they should be held to strict accountability for results. Simi- 
larly of the electorate: Mill was too much impressed with the 
dangers of democracy to fall in with the unqualified demand 
for an extension of the franchise, until by education men 
should become better fitted for their political duties; and he 
continued to regard as desirable some scheme of plural voting 
whereby superior education could receive the added weight 
he thought its due, though he confesses that he sees no work- 
able form that this could take. 

5. On more fundamental speculative issues also, Mill stands 
in a relation to his predecessors which is a little anomalous. 
On the whole, while he has a much clearer appreciation of the 
difficulties to be met, and is led consequently to concessions 
here and there, he conceives that he is still holding to the 
faith. But the concessions are often just the entering wedge 
that makes it impossible not to go further; and Mill is there- 
fore constantly being reduced to desperate logical devices to 
prevent a more thoroughgoing break than he is prepared to 
accept. 

The insecurity of Mill's position may be noted first in con- 
nection with his ethics. Mill brings to ethical speculation 
the fervor which Bentham lacked, and he brings, too, an explicit 
recognition of logical problems which Bentham had slighted; 
but the result is rather to complicate Utilitarian theory than 
to clarify it. He sets out in the first place to vindicate Utili- 
tarianism, against the charge of being a base and materialistic 
creed. On the assumption of the dominant claims of the uni- 
versal happiness, the falsity of the charge scarcely needs prov- 
ing; it would be more plausible to say that the ideal is too 
high for imperfect man. And when INIill goes on to supple- 
ment Bentham's intellectualism by a glowing vindication of 
the value of the social feelings, and of an ideal nobleness of will 



/. ^. Mill 75 

and conduct, as against a mere calculation of external con- 
sequences, the result is one in which the most hostile critic 
cannot fail to find an exceptional elevation of ethical tone. But 
in all this Mill is constantly tending to lose sight of the real 
issue. He proves triumphantly that Utilitarian philosophers 
are far from ignoble; he is less successful in showing that they 
have a logical right to their moral elevation on the psycho- 
logical principles they profess. When he turns to this theoreti- 
cal justification, his logic, by general consent, breaks down com- 
pletely. His most important innovation is his doctrine that 
pleasures differ, not, as Bentham had explicitly held, in amount 
only, but in quality as well; and this gives him a decided ad- 
vantage in repelling the charge that pleasure-getting is an 
unworthy end of conduct. But if some pleasures are pre- 
ferable not because they are more pleasant, but because they 
differ in kind, does not this compromise the claim that pleas- 
antness is the sole test of good? As a matter of fact in the 
actual use he makes of the concept of quality, as the direct 
emotional perception of an essential "dignity" in human na- 
ture, and of the ignoble character of self-seeking and organic 
ends. Mill evidently has in mind something not easy to reduce 
to the mere desire for pleasure. In the theoretical explanation 
of his meaning, however, there is no satisfactory basis given for 
this. A "higher" pleasure is simply a pleasure which experts 
who have had experience of both prefer. Even granting the 
doubtful assumption that there is any single standard judg- 
ment on which all experts would agree, at best the only safe 
implication here is, that for human beings there are some pleas- 
ures which typically are, again, more pleasant than others, and 
which therefore they will as a matter of fact choose when they 
have the requisite data; no reason appears why they ought 
to choose them, or why if they fail to do so they should think 
themselves contemptible and blameworthy. 

Equally conspicuous is Mill's failure to make a logical tran- 
sition between the thesis of psychological hedonism, to the 



yd English and American Philosophy 

effect that everyone necessarily pursues his own pleasure, and 
the standard of the universal happiness which he is mainly 
interested in enforcing; indeed the failure is so striking that 
it has passed into the text books on logic as an illustration 
of the fallacy known as Composition. The argument hinges 
on the claim that because each person's happiness is a good 
to that person^ the general happiness is a good to the aggre- 
gate of all persons. Mill afterwards explained that in saying 
that the general happiness is a good to the aggregate of all 
persons, he did not mean that every human being's happiness 
is a good to every other human being; he only intended to 
argue that since A's happiness is a good, B's a good, C's 
a good, etc., the sum of all these goods must be a good.^ 
But then the argument is nothing but an exercise in language — 
an objective generalization about the things to which the 
word "good" is applied; and as such it is no argument at all, 
since the real problem is one of individual motivation, and 
there is nothing to show that everything to which the logical 
term applies has a claim upon me, any more than that every- 
thing which answers to the definition of food I shall want 
to eat. Mill had indeed a practical solution of the conflict 
between individual and social good, in his confidence that, 
through education, the social sympathies may conceivably be 
so extended as in the end to identify a man's own interests with 
those of his fellows; but a Utopian prophecy of the future 
is not a sufficient substitute for an adequate logical analysis. 
6. Mill's ultimate metaphysical beliefs are dealt with most 
at length in his Logic, and in the Examination of Sir William 
Hamilton's Philosophy. The Logic is usually held to be his 
most substantial contribution to philosophy. Logic in Eng- 
land had already, prior to the appearance of Mill's book, re- 
ceived an impetus in the writings of Whately, and, more 
especially, in the beginnings of a theory of induction, or sci- 
entific method, in the learned volumes of William Whewell. 
^ Life and Letters, Vol. II, p. ii6. 



/. S. Mill 77 

Whewell had been chiefly impressed by the part that hypothe- 
sis plays in scientific inquiry; and he endeavors to analyze the 
peculiar contribution that is made by the creative intellect in 
scientific discovery. Briefly, this consists in appl5dng to the 
mere coflection of facts a unifying conception that shaH serve 
to bind these facts together; and the discovery of the right 
conception — a discovery due not to rule but to native sa- 
gacity — is the great work of scientific genius. The facts come 
from sense experience. But the unifying ideas are from the 
mind itself; and apart from them we have only empirical laws 
of phenomena, which are to be sharply distinguished from true 
causal explanation. Such concepts are conceived by Whewell, 
imder the influence of Kant, as general forms of apprehension 
inherent in the mind, and possessed thereby of the necessity 
which data of experience lack. Unfortunately Whewell mixes 
up here what is in some respects an instructive emphasis on 
the role of hypothesis with a metaphysics which is of doubtful 
service in a scientific inquiry, even in the hands of a much 
more competent metaphysician than he can claim to be. 

Mill, as an empiricist, takes of course the opposite road, 
and for him the true end of causal induction is to discover the 
laws of phenomena themselves. The most original portion of 
the book is the attempt, along lines already suggested in Sir 
John Herschel's Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, 
to formulate the inductive methods by which science is en- 
abled to sift out from the connections between events those 
"unconditional" sequences which represent true causaUty. To 
this task all logical processes are subordinate, and "formal 
logic" accordingly loses its exclusive title to the name; al- 
though as an account of the way in which we can, negatively, 
remove obstacles to the attainment of inductive truth by 
avoiding inconsistencies in our thinking, it still performs an 
important service. It follows that the syllogism must be de- 
posed from its central place in logic, and its function rein- 
terpreted. The fundamental act of inference is not a per- 



78 English and American Philosophy 

ception of the presence already of a conclusion in a universal 
premise; it is resolvable into the expectation that, since a 
number of individuals are known to possess a given attribute, 
other individuals resembling them in certain further respects 
will be found to possess this also. In other words, inference 
is always from particulars to particulars. General propositions 
are merely "registers" of such inferences already made, and 
short formulae for making more; the conclusion is not an 
inference drawn jrom the major premise, but an inference 
drawn according to the formula which the major premise sets 
forth, the real logical antecedent or premise being the particu- 
lar facts from which the general proposition was collected by 
induction. Whether the induction was validly performed is, 
again, the business of the inductive methods to determine. 
Instead of judgment being concerned, then, as had been the 
prevailing opinion in logical theory, with the recognition of a 
relation between concepts, or ideas in our minds, what it 
really asserts is a succession, coexistence, or similitude between 
things or jacts. 

7. The practical value of Mill's formulation of the laws of 
induction is largely independent of the sensationalism which he 
had inherited. As a matter of fact when he is speaking as a 
logician he commonly ignores this, and assumes like any 
sensible scientist that he is dealing not with sensations, but 
with a world of external processes which our ideas more or 
less adequately construe. In the background however there 
always lurks the sensationalistic idealism of his school; and 
it remains to ask whether he is any more successful than his 
father in making this consistent v/ith the everyday belief which 
we all assume to be valid in practice. 

Mill's treatment of the existence of a physical world, to 
take this first, is open to the same charge of logical confusion 
that attaches to his innovations in ethics; an ambiguity of 
phrase hides an essential transition of thought. Mill tries to 



/. S. Mill 79 

avoid postulating more than sensationalistic data as the legiti- 
mate objects of knowledge, and to escape at the same time 
the absurdities of solipsism, by calling external objects, not 
independent realities, but ''permanent possibilities of sensa- 
tion." Strictly such a phrase, on the presuppositions of ideal- 
ism with which Mill does not break, can only stand for the 
experienced fact that sensations do reappear under regular 
conditions, so that we can anticipate definite similarities in the 
future. But insensibly the reader is led to attach a more posi- 
tive and active content to the term "possibility," and to think 
of it as an undefined source of new sensations — that which 
makes them possible — having an actual present existence in 
a form capable of showing causal efficiency; and it is only this 
second interpretation that at all corresponds to our everyday 
beliefs and language. Explicitly Mill does not commit himself 
to any but the former meaning, for which what we call an ob- 
ject is just a cluster of sensations, plus the anticipated possi- 
bility of getting other sensations if we go to work the right way. 
So far as an independently existing world goes, his explanation 
is merely an account of the manner in which we come to a be- 
lief in this — a belief which, as the explanation would appear 
to show, has no legitimate basis in fact. But in spite of this 
he continues to express himself in these same illegitimate terms, 
as if they were quite justified, whenever it is necessary to give 
verisimilitude to his opinions; in fact he cannot avoid this 
even when he makes the effort. Thus his explanation of the 
way we come to a belief in other selves will only work by pre- 
supposing that my neighbor's body is a real physical object, 
and not a part of my own psychical content.^ Mill's own 
real working opinion apparently is, not that an object means 
no more than a group of sensations, but that a real existence 
of some sort is the occasion of sensations in us, although there 
is no reason for supposing these to have any likeness to their 
^Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, Vol. I, pp. 255 ff. 



8o English and American Philosophy 

cause. It is this whole conception of an independent cause, 
however, and not its knowable character simply, that his ex- 
plicit analysis has undermined. 

In the more general problem with which empiricism has to 
deal — the possibility of beliefs that do not arise from the 
connection of particular experiences through the laws of asso- 
ciation, — Mill's position is also not entirely straightforward. 
In the end he finds himself forced to give up his father's as- 
surance of the all-sufficiency of association, and to grant that 
a few residual facts are beyond its competency to explain. This 
is at any rate true of the power of memory to reach out into 
the past, of belief as an ultimate and unanalyzable attitude, 
and of some at least of the simpler relations; probably also 
it is true of the unitary self, since the consciousness of a 
string of psychical facts as a unitary series cannot easily, he 
allows, be identified with the mere separate items of the series, 
or with one member of it among others, but must in some mys- 
terious way be present to them all. At this point Mill, after 
admitting that in principle the doctrine breaks down, ought 
presumably to have set about recasting the association philoso- 
phy; instead he thinks it enough to take such facts as a ''final 
inexplicability," which it is best to accept without any theory 
about them. And thereafter he leaves them on one side, and 
returns to his faith in association as a universal solvent. 

8. The most crucial problem, for Mill, is that of "neces- 
sary" beliefs; and here he holds consistently, as against any 
form of intuitionalism, that there is no reason to suppose these 
to have been acquired otherwise than by experience — that is, 
by the repetition of sensational data independently of further 
assumptions. The ''necessity" of a belief is due solely to the 
difficulty we have in breaking down an association between 
particular ideas; we need only suppose a connection to have 
been so frequent and undeviating between two ideas as to 
make them practically inseparable, to have all that is required 
to account for so-called necessities of thought. It follows that 



/. 5. Mill 8i 

any such necessity might conceivably be overborne by fresh 
experience. Mill accordingly argues vigorously against the 
criterion of "inconceivability" on which some of his contempo- 
raries relied. There is to begin with, as he points out, an am- 
biguity in the meaning of the term. Our inability to conceive 
the contrary may have reference in the first place to a difficulty 
in believing something that past experience has seemed to dis- 
credit, even though we can quite easily imagine the more 
familiar association of ideas broken up. Thus the notion of 
the antipodes will at first be pronounced inconceivable, which 
does not prevent a more disciplined mind, however, from ac- 
cepting it implicitly. Here it is natural to agree with Mill that 
association plays the central role, and that nothing in the 
nature of necessity is involved. But there is another sort of 
belief that offers more trouble. Can we agree also that in such 
judgments as "two and two make four," "parallel lines can 
never meet," "a round square cannot exist," we equally have 
beliefs that are due to mere repetitions of experience, the ex- 
periences in these cases having been so multitudinous and so in- 
variable that the connected ideas cannot, in the absence of a 
contrary model, be separated from one another even in imagi- 
nation? 

There seems no reason to question the apparent fact that 
conviction here is the result of analysis rather than of repeti- 
tion, and that if repetition is called for, it is only to assure 
us that the analysis was correctly performed. The dispute 
turns largely on our theory of conceptual knowledge. Take 
as an example the truth that the angles of a triangle are equal 
to two right angles. If we suppose with Mill that this is a 
generalization from all the particular triangles we have ex- 
amined, it follows indeed that the judgment falls short of ne- 
cessity; and not only that, but in strictness it never is quite 
exactly true, since we have never in our experience, probably, 
come across a triangle formed of perfectly straight lines. But as 
a "necessary" truth, the judgment is intended to apply to 



82 English and American Philosophy 

phenomenal triangles only in so far as they approximate the 
ideal and perfect triangle, of which last alone geometry professes 
to speak. Now since for the sensationalists an idea is only 
a psychical image representative of an indefinite number of 
particular objects, our notion that we can think the "ideal" 
triangle can only be an illusion; and if we can thus deal only 
with particular triangles, Mill's conclusions would seem to 
follow. 

If, however, we suppose our thought, whatever may be its 
foundation in the image, to have the power to mean, or to 
refer to, abstract and precisely definable characters viewed 
without reference to their concrete embodiment, and to de- 
velop out of them new and ideal constructions, the possibility 
is open that we may be able, by scrutinizing these construc- 
tions, to discover further relationships involved in them which 
are necessary, in the sense that they always must be there if 
the conditions which imply them are there. And for this no 
indefinite repetition of particular instances is required; we can 
be sure that the angles of a triangle never will be more or less 
than two right angles, because the truth, though not an actual 
part of the definition, is involved in what we have defined a 
triangle to be. It would still remain so that the particular 
empirical sequences in the world do not share in this abstract 
necessity of relational implication; and since for Mill the se- 
quences alone are real, the device would not have seemed 
to him to meet his philosophic needs. If "two and two 
make four" means simply that, if we put two pairs of objects 
together, we shall on counting find only four present, it is 
true that nothing but experience is responsible for our not 
expecting a fifth object mysteriously to have insinuated itself 
into the group. But if, as Mill would have to hold, everything 
in mathematics that goes beyond such empirical generalizations 
is a matter purely of verbal definition, and not objective truth 
at all, no explanation is available of the success with which 
these "unreal" truths, discovered only through the manipula- 



/. S. Mill 83 

tion of Ideas, fit into and enable us to anticipate the actual 
facts of experience. 

9. One case in particular of a necessary truth is of special 
importance, since it is implicated in the logic of induction. 
How do we account for the universality or unconditionalness 
of causal law, if a belief in the uniformity of nature is wholly 
a generalization from experience? Mill's answer seems at 
two points to presuppose the result which he is trying to ex- 
plain. Causality is clearly one of those beliefs which, on Mill's 
theory, have a compulsion only to be accounted for by an ex- 
ceptionally wide and uncontradicted experience; and Mill 
accordingly talks about instances of causal connection as 
having met us every moment of our lives. It is hard not to 
suppose however a confusion here. It is of course true that we 
are surrounded by a countless number of what, from the stand- 
point of scientific knowledge where the causal law already is 
assumed, are cases of causal happenings; and it also is true 
that from the standpoint of mere presuppositionless experi- 
ence, we are surrounded by innumerable facts of sequence. 
But that all these sequences present themselves as uncondi- 
tional sequences is not true; far from its being so that for 
our knowledge every event is found to have a cause, in the 
majority of cases the cause is overlooked, and many times we 
fail to find it even when we seek. Were we not already con- 
vinced that everything must needs have a cause, the effect of 
experience would be bewilderment rather than an unescapable 
association. 

A similar begging of the issue is to be found in Mill's 
account of the way in which the general law of causation ac- 
quires a certainty superior to particular laws, so that in this 
instance the major premise of our causal syllogism, instead 
merely of registering past inferences, adds logical weight to the 
expectation of causality in the new case. The reason is, that 
a generalization that extends to all the facts of experience over- 
comes thereby a logical defect attaching to narrower infer- 



84 English and American Philosophy 

ences. The difficulty with the method of a simple enumeration 
of instances for the discovery of causal law, is that it affords 
no guarantee that a connection, even when it has always been 
found to be present, may not perhaps be due to chance — to 
accidental collocations, or to the accidental absence of coun- 
teracting agencies. And if we suppose the range of a generaliza- 
tion so widely extended that there is no time or place or 
combination of circumstances but must afford an example either 
of its truth or falsity, then its truth cannot be contingent on 
any collocations save such as exist at all times and places, nor 
can it be frustrated by any counteracting agencies unl^s 
by such as never actually occur. But the logical theory on 
which such an argument rests merely gives us ground for be- 
lieving that, ij the world is causally organized, we are likely 
to have picked the true cause rather than a chance coincidence; 
as Mill himself puts it, we are left with the alternative between 
the right cause, and no cause at all. This ought no doubt to 
be sufficient if we have already granted the causal assumption ; 
but Mill overlooks the fact that it is precisely a ground for 
the preference of some cause to no cause at all that he is 
called upon to show. 

Meanwhile in estimating Mill's distrust of necessary prin- 
ciples, it is only fair to remember once more that he is inter- 
ested not only in a metaphysics, but in the worth of a certain 
practical attitude. And so long as it is necessary to break down 
dogmatism and prejudice, there is an advantage in calling 
attention to the fact that our mere ease or difficulty in think- 
ing a thing is not bound to legislate for the universe. When 
however this purpose is accomplished, it seems possible also 
to go too far in a distrust of human nature and the reach 
of human thought; we are not called upon to be forever telling 
ourselves that our beliefs conceivably may all be wrong. What 
we are really interested in is the stability of belief, and not its 
possession of a special logical character called necessity. On 
the assumption that the right to believe does rest upon logical 



/. S. Mill 85 

necessity, the disproof of necessity must of course undermine 
our assurance; but this assumption is not itself a necessary one. 
And when we find Mill insisting that a mental compulsion 
constitutes no title deed to the possession of ultimate truth, 
and urging the absurdity of supposing that the "mind should 
be blindly determined to represent truly the reality which it 
does not know," it is pertinent to observe that this "absurdity" 
is a literal description of Mill's own account of memory, in 
whose veracity he nevertheless unhesitatingly confides. 

10. Mill himself seems in the end to have come to feel to 
some extent that empirical sequences do not have the only 
claim upon our tolerance, and to have relaxed the Utilitarian 
attitude of hostility even to ultimate religious beliefs.^ He 
allows that along with conceptions that have a scientific foun- 
dation, there are others which appeal to us in a different way; 
and he does not deny that these last may also have a value. 
"I think," he writes, "that as mankind improve, they will much 
more realize two independent mental provinces, the province 
of belief, and the province of imaginary conjecture; that they 
will become capable of keeping them distinct; and, while they 
unite their belief to the evidence, will think it allowable to 
let their imaginative anticipations go forth, not carrying be- 
lief in their train, in the direction in which experience and study 
of human nature shows to be the most improving to the char- 
acter, and most exalting and consoling to the individual feel- 
ings." If no positive facts stand in the way. Mill would thus 
allow us at least to play intellectually with any view of things 
that seems likely to act as a spur to the moral life. It is not 
that our feelings have in theory any connection with truth; the 
whole right is based solely upon pragmatic considerations. It 
is a case of looking on the brighter side of things, the cultiva- 
tion of a cheerful disposition; and it is to be approved for the 
reason that cheerfulness is better than despondency. A be- 
lief in God may have this value; the thought of a higher co- 

* Three Essays on Religion. 



86 English and American Philosophy 

worker in the affairs of the universe tends to the enlarge- 
ment of the general scale of the feelings, "the loftier aspira- 
tions being no longer in the same degree checked and kept 
down by a sense of the insignificance of human life — by the 
disastrous feeling of 'not worth while.' " The evidence for this 
creed, indeed, "if evidence it can be called, is too shadowy 
and unsubstantial, and the promises it holds out too distant and 
uncertain, to admit of its being a permanent substitute for 
the religion of humanity." But the two may be held in con- 
junction; and one is "at liberty to indulge the pleasing and 
encouraging thought, that its truth is possible." 

The trouble with such a position plainly is, that hope that 
stops short of anything that can be called belief is too little 
substantial to wear well under the stress of human affairs. 
Probably Mill had himself, in his later years at any rate, rather 
a greater confidence here than his philosophical terminology 
would allow him to express; indeed he seems definitely in- 
clined to hold that, in the appearance of design in the world, 
there is positive evidence of a sort for the existence of a being 
who may serve as the God of religion. It is perfectly clear to 
him however — and this is his most settled opinion in con- 
nection with the whole matter — that if this be so, God must be 
a finite God with definite limitations. For the fact of evil is 
too omnipresent in the world of nature to make possible the 
belief in a God who is both benevolent, and all-powerful; "if 
the Maker of the world can all that he wills, he wills misery, 
and there is no escape from the conclusion." 

§ 3. The Philosophical Radicals. Bain. Aiistin. 
J. F. Stephen. Sidgwick 

I, Of the Philosophical Radicals who carried the Bentham- 
ite doctrines into politics, George Grote, the historian, is the 
only one who can be regarded as belonging to the history of 
philosophy; and Grote, while from early youth he was deeply 



George Grote 87 

interested in metaphysics, and did good work in the historical 
field in connection with Plato and Aristotle, left behind little 
of importance apart from a few posthumous articles on ethics. 
In these the point most deserving of notice is his elaboration 
of the "social" character of moral obligation. Society, in its 
collective capacity, determines what sort of conduct it wants 
from the individual, and in the form of authority imposes this 
upon him. In return it undertakes also to reward this social 
subservience by an attitude of benevolent approval and pro- 
tection. And the social sentiment is a complex state of mind 
due to the association of the acts demanded by society with 
the feelings, or social judgments of approval and disapproval, 
that men come to look for as their natural due. This is a 
laudable attempt to bridge the gap which Bentham had left 
between the individual and the social judgment; it seems 
clear however that it still leaves the desire for personal benefits 
the only real reason — for mere habit is not a reason — why a 
man should, when he thinks about it, hold himself bound to 
postpone his own happiness to that of the community if the 
two conflict. And in the end indeed Grote accepts the moral 
supremacy of society as represented by the collective opinion 
of the majority, and the right of society in consequence to 
exact obedience from the individual, as something so self- 
evident to the meral judgment that the philosopher is not 
called upon to demonstrate it. 

2. In psychology, the tradition of James Mill was carried 
on by Alexander Bain. Bain represents the association psy- 
chology on the point of passing over into the more modern 
conception of the science, through the explicit recognition of 
the need for looking beyond empirical trains of sensations to 
their physical and organic conditions. Such a recognition had 
originally played a large share in the speculations of Hartley, 
the founder of associationalism, but it had centered about a 
theory of nerve process which friend and foe alike agreed in 
declining to take seriously; and with Hartley's ITtilitarian fol- 



88 English and American Philosophy 

lowers, as has appeared, interest was exclusively directed to the 

analysis of mental states. Some credit for calling attention to 
the physiological basis of mind belongs to the phrenologists, 
who in Great Britain were ably represented by George Combe; 
but phrenology was too fully committed to its peculiar dogmas 
to be in good odor with scientists generally. 

Bain's chief addition to the machinery of sensationalism is 
his acceptance of a primitive spontaneity, or activity of the 
organism, originating in internal impulses independent of out- 
ward stimuli. Bain declines indeed to go very far in the 
way of admitting definite instincts; mostly he thinks of this 
activity as diffusive and vaguely directed, and as taking on 
specific forms only through the chance production of a sense 
of pleasurable feeling which accompanies heightened activity, 
and which then detains and fixes the hitherto random move- 
ments. His recognition of activity, however, enables him to 
throw new light on many psychological matters, especially in 
connection with the theory of emotion and of volition, where 
James Mill had been notably weak, A similar advantage, 
through a clearer recognition of the part played by the mus- 
cular feelings and the sense of resistance, might have accrued 
to his theory of perception; but he partly forfeits this advan- 
tage through his idealistic insistence that after all the external 
world is not revealed to us as that which resists our muscular 
energy, but is no more than the experienced feeling itself, and 
so one psychical fact among others. As a matter of fact, if 
"primitive spontaneity" refers only to a peculiar kind of sensa- 
tion, and not to actual movements of the physical organism, it 
is robbed of all significant meaning. 

Two further points, also connected with the notion of ac- 
tivity, deserve notice here, because of their bearing on general 
philosophical problems — the psychological account of belief, 
and that of our belief in causation in particular. To begin 
with the latter, Bain avoids the logical difficulty present in 
J. S. Mill's account of the inductive principle, by his accep- 



Alexander Bain 89 

tance of an original spontaneous tendency to assume that fa- 
miliar sequences will be repeated — an assumption frankly- 
begged, and recognized as having only a practical and not a 
theoretical justification. The more general theory of belief is 
usually regarded as one of Bain's most original contributions. 
There are however difficulties in determining precisely what 
this theory is. It contains two elements which do not fuse very 
readily; and Bain's growing perception of this leads him to 
modify his original formulation, until in the end the most dis- 
tinctive feature of it is refined away. Belief arises, Bain 
holds, in a situation in which immediate "spontaneity" has 
been displaced by hesitation, and the use of secondary means; 
when any creature is found performing an action, indifferent 
in itself, with a view to some end, and adhering to it, we say 
that the animal possesses confidence, or belief, in a certain 
arrangement of nature relevant to the end he is after.^ Now 
this, in so far as it is imambiguous, amounts to saying that be- 
lief is constituted by a sense of confidence in the order of 
experience. Its original source is a "primitive credulity," or a 
disposition to expect any sequence of ideas that has once oc- 
curred to be repeated; and this credulity, in the more de- 
veloped intellectual life, continues as "belief," in so far as 
sequences have remained uncontradicted by later experience. 
Here the only "activity" involved is in the flow of ideas, belief 
being the unimpeded anticipation of a coming idea; in other 
words, it is Bain's account of causation again, or of a belief 
in the uniformity of nature. What Bain would like to do, how- 
ever, is to connect this also with the actual physical action 
which the situation implies, and to find that which distin- 
guishes belief from imagination in an "impulse of persever- 
ance," or a "preparedness to act," which is itself incipient ac- 
tion. But he was reluctantly driven to the conclusion that 
it is impossible thus to reduce the actual content of the believ- 

* The Emotions and the Will, pp. i?68 ff. (ist Ed.) ; pp. <,o<, ff. (3rd 
Ed.) 



90 English and American Philosophy 

ing experience itself to the sense that we are acting or about 
to act; and accordingly the theory tends to leave us only with 
the more familiar notion that belief is what occasions the con- 
tinuance of the action rather than identical with it, and action 
the test of a genuine belief instead of its intrinsic nature. 

Meanwhile the former of the two accounts has a close con- 
nection with another of Bain's doctrines — that of "fixed ideas." 
Rational action, or volition in the proper sense, is, for Bain, 
action directed toward the securing of pleasure, or the avoid- 
ance of pain. But there is also another and non-rational form 
of action, which previous Utilitarians had not recognized, due 
to the automatic tendency of ideas that hold possession of the 
mind to issue in appropriate movements. And it is this con- 
ception of ideo-motor action which suggests Bain's most original 
contribution to ethics. It has appeared that a difficulty ex- 
ists for hedonism in the need for explaining how we come to 
adopt other people's happiness as a motive, especially when 
this clashes with our own. The new solution is, that in sym- 
pathy, as a source of social action, we have the most striking 
example of the Fixed Idea. The thought of other people's 
pains and pleasures, embedded in the mind through many 
repeated forms of gregarious experience, tends without volition 
to carry itself over into conduct; and it may be so compelling 
as to overbear the rational desire for pleasure of our own. 
Bain might thereupon perhaps have been expected to tell us 
that, since sympathy is irrational, it should be eliminated as 
speedily as possible in favor of conscious volition; but as a 
matter of fact, as he proceeds, it appears to shed the charac- 
teristics that belong to fixed ideas elsewhere, and to become 
sufficiently reasonable to retain its claim upon us even at the 
expense of that desire for pleasure which elsewhere is regarded 
as essential to a rational motive. The best reconciliation Bain 
can suggest is, that at some time in the future society may 
make such arrangements as will repay the sacrifices to public 
duty that often go at present uncompensated, and thus may 



/. F. Stephen 91 

overcome the opposition between private and public good; 
though we are not told why this future possibility should be 
allowed to have weight in our judgments on conduct in the 
meantime. 

3. Two further names may perhaps be bracketed together 
here, though about their proper classification some question 
might be raised — John Austin, and Sir James Fitzjames 
Stephen. Philosophically both are good Utilitarians in that 
they accept in ethics pleasure as the end, and utility as a 
standard; but in their ultimate sympathies it is less clear to 
what extent they are loyal Benthamites. Not only do they 
find in religion a solution of certain theoretical difficulties in 
a manner that recalls Paley rather than Bentham, but also in 
both the passion for reform is to say the least very much 
subdued. Austin's main work is in the field of jurisprudence; 
but he introduces this with an account of the ethics of utility 
which has many merits in the way of clearness and logical 
precision. Obligation means for Austin nothing but the com- 
mand of a superior, able to enforce his will by rewards and 
penalties; and just as legal duty therefore is identical with 
the commands of the political sovereign, so duty in the wider 
sense presupposes a divine sovereign. Utility is thus not the 
ultimate source of morality — this lies in the will of God; but 
if God wills, as we may suppose he does, the general welfare, 
utility continues to serve as an index by which we can infer, 
from the effects on human happiness, the nature of the laws 
which God imposes. These take the shape of general rules, 
whose dignity and universal character it is unsafe to tamper 
with in an attempt to apply calculation to particular cases; 
Austin inclines to think they ought to be followed in their 
absolute form, and no exceptions allowed. And for the most 
of our conduct we do not even need to have utility actually 
in mind; it is enough to follow general sentiments of liking 
and aversion. These sentiments however are not inscrutable 
and innate, as the intuitionalists maintain. It is just the dan- 



92 English and American Philosophy 

gerous consequences of the wrong act to which originally dis- 
approval attaches; and in practice therefore feeling is no more 
opposed to utility, than the rudder of a boat is opposed to the 
sail, or to the breeze which swells the sail. In Austin's po- 
litical speculations there is the same strong emphasis on an 
abstract conception of sovereignty, as against the competing 
doctrine of "rights." Bentham also, it is true, had found the 
idea of natural rights obnoxious. But it had been mainly 
on account of its connection with unreasoned forms of emo- 
tional bias which hamper the reformer; in Austin the motive 
tends in the quite different direction of a willingness to exalt 
legalism over the spirit of liberty. 

4. The need of appealing to religious sanctions if Utili- 
tarianism is to hold its ground against egoistic hedonism gets 
also an interesting setting in J. F. Stephen. With Stephen it is 
motivated by temperamental antipathies. To any form of 
effusive sentiment he had a strong aversion, but especially to 
the sort of sentiment which in his day was turning democracy 
and social reform into a religion of humanity. Stephen was 
himself of the hard-headed, unenthusiastic, personally ambi- 
tious type, scornful of ideals that are not to be attained by 
strenuous human effort under actual working conditions, with 
strong personal affections in a narrow field, a frank indiffer- 
ence to the remoter portions of mankind, and an honest hatred 
of his enemies. The demand that we substitute for the inter- 
ests of ourselves, our friends, and our country, the welfare of 
the human race at large, seemed to him a silly affectation. 
Even in his earlier days, when he was an orthodox Christian, 
he had slight affinity with the peculiarly Christian ideal. The 
humanitarianism of the Sermon on the Mount r'epelled and per- 
plexed him; it would, he declared, if lived up to, turn the 
world upside down. If therefore we ask whether we are in 
duty bound to go further than the current morality of the 
man of the world, the answer is. Yes, if there is a God and a 
future state; No, if there is no God and no future state. If 



/. F. Stephen 93 

there is to be any firm basis for the ideal of the general wel- 
fare, it must be found, not in an impossible extension of hu- 
manitarian sympathy, but in a "Christianity founded on Hell/' 
through the belief in a future life which an omnipotent God 
makes use of to enlist man's self-interest in the service of a 
universal morality. Such a God is not himself to be regarded 
as benevolent; but his law, though stem and inflexible, is 
noble, and excites a feeling of awful respect for its author. 

5. The ethical theory of the Utilitarians has another dis- 
tinguished representative in Henry Sidgwick, though here also 
a question might be raised about the classification. Sidgwick 
is indeed a professed opponent of sensationalism and posi- 
tivism; and even in ethics he introduces modifications that 
amount almost to a revolution. The nature of his most im- 
portant book, the Methods of Ethics, is suggested by its title. 
He proposes to examine, not primarily competing notions of 
the ethical end, but the various ways to be found in the moral 
consciousness of mankind of attaining reasoned convictions 
about matters of duty. Of these he distinguishes three main 
t5^es — the calculation of consequences in terms of egoistic 
satisfaction, immediate intuition, and pleasure calculation di- 
rected toward the universal good, this last being identical with 
Utilitarianism. After a remarkably close and realistic ex- 
amination of the facts of the ethical judgment, the conclusion 
is reached that none of these methods is without serious im- 
perfections; and none can in practice be adopted to the en- 
tire exclusion of the others. Between the intuitional and the 
Utilitarian methods, an approximate reconciliation is in prin- 
ciple fairly simple. The judgments which express the im- 
mediate dictates of conscience everywhere imply as a matter 
of fact a reference to social happiness to support them, and 
to explain their limitations and qualifications; while at the 
same time we are accustomed to make explicit reference to 
utility only in exceptional cases, the majority of our judgments 
being, as the Utilitarian may agree with the intuitionalist, di- 



94 English and American Philosophy 

rect and unmediated. Between egoistic and universalistic he- 
donism, however, there is a more serious lack of coincidence. 
Common-sense morality recognizes both the claims of pru- 
dence and the right to personal happiness on the one hand, and 
the obligation to consult the common good on the other; and 
there is no method of fully identifying the two demands. 
Morality is thus incapable of being completely rationalized, 
unless indeed we go beyond the sphere of scientific ethics, and 
postulate a universe prepared to make up somehow to the in- 
dividual his sacrifices to duty. 

In terms of the traditional problems of ethics, then, Sidg- 
wick casts in his lot on the whole with the Benthamite doctrine 
of the general happiness as the ultimate good. But he does 
this with far greater exactness of analysis than any of his pre- 
decessors; and as the outcome of this analysis he makes two 
modifications in particular which change the whole complexion 
of the theory. In the first place he agrees with Butler that 
pleasure is not necessarily in point of fact the only thing at 
which we aim, since in many cases no pleasure would be forth- 
coming imless we already had an independent desire for certain 
objects or activities; the only thing that Utilitarianism need 
claim is, that apart from pleasure nothing approves itself to re- 
flection as worth desiring. But also he holds that an appeal 
after all to intuition is required even by a hedonistic theory of 
pleasure as the Summum Bonum. When a moralist calls pleas- 
ure the good, he means to imply, not simply that we try to 
get pleasure as a matter of fact, but that a maximum of pleas- 
ure is what as reasonable human beings we ought to aim at. 
But this "ought" introduces a new element over and above 
any appeal to facts of feeling. Implied even in the recognition 
of the claims of prudence over mere temporary desire, this is 
particularly apparent when we ask why we should prefer the 
universal happiness. Sidgwick finds the new element in an 
immediate deliverance of the rational consciousness, based on 
the self-evident perception that a greater amount of good is 



/. F. Stephen 95 

better than a less. Grant that pleasure is to be accepted as a 
good at £dl, and a man can see by a direct intuition that he 
ought not as an impartial and rational being to prefer a pres- 
ent lesser good to a future greater good, and that he ought not 
to prefer his own lesser good to the greater good of others. 
It is this intuitive act of reason, carrying with it a necessary 
reference to obligation, which constitutes the most ultimate fact 
of the ethical consciousness. 



CHAPTER III 
AUTHORITY AND REASON IN THEOLOGY 

§ I. Arnold. The Oxford Movement. Newman 

I. While secularism was being fashioned into a thorough- 
going philosophical creed by the Utilitarians, an intellectual 
ferment along very different lines was taking place in the world 
of religious thought; and though it is true that the results of 
this for philosophy are meagre, it engages so large a share 
of the intellectual energies of a generation of Englishmen, that 
it can hardly be left unnoticed. There are several distinct 
and even sharply hostile forms which this theological renais- 
sance assumes; but in a general way they have a common 
character even in their diversity. Their interest lies less in 
the quest for abstract rationality or truth, than in the con- 
crete and the historical — in the institutional forms of the 
Church, that is to say, and the emotional realities of religious 
experience as these center about historic dogmas. It is by 
anticipating, somewhat faintly to be sure, the significance of 
the historical outlook, which the rise of the notion of develop- 
ment was later to bring to the front, but which the academic 
philosophies had hitherto ignored, that the religious movement 
makes its chief speculative contribution. 

In the precursors of the intellectual revival in the Church 
there is little prophecy of its future course. Richard Whately, 
the most commanding figure here, is primarily a logician, and 
spiritually has more in common with the milder rationalism 
of the preceding century than with the theologians who im- 

96 



Richard Whately 97 

mediately followed him. Whately's most influential work is 
in the field of formal logic, to which he gave a new impulse by 
helping to clear up the confusions due to its entanglement with 
epistemology, and by more clearly recognizing its practical 
function within these narrower limits; logic for him, that is, 
is not a method for the discovery of truth, but has its use 
primarily in detecting fallacies in argument. An interest in 
puncturing fallacies is the most characteristic feature of Whate- 
ly's robust and acute, but not over-sensitive mind; in religion 
it directs his attention to the field of Christian Evidences, of 
which, conceived as a process of unfolding the implications in 
the premises of the unbeliever, and so bringing him to admit 
your conclusions, Whately thinks very highly. A striking 
example of his method is the readable, ingenious, and quite 
irrelevant Historic Doubts about Napoleon, which is intended 
by a reductio ad absurdum to show how unreasonable are at- 
tacks on the historical truth of Christianity. Of the same in- 
tellectual type as Whately is R. D. Hampden, now chiefly 
remembered as the storm center of two bitter ecclesiastical 
controversies in the era of Tractarianism ; and Adam Sedg- 
wick the geologian, whose Discourse on the Studies of the Uni- 
versity of Cambridge contains a defence of natural religion 
which acquired a reputation not at this day easy to under- 
stand. But the tendencies which Whately and Sedgwick 
represent had no great immediate results. The only name 
connected with Whately's group which really counts for much 
in the troubled period about to be inaugurated is that of 
Thomas Arnold, and his importance lies in a different direction. 
2. The most prominent character of Arnold's mind is his 
genuine but slightly over-emphatic piety. The religious senti- 
ment is a sensitive one, and when we set out actively to culti- 
vate it, there is unfortunately a chance of interfering with its 
healthy growth. Arnold is lacking in any sense of danger here, 
any check to his clerical enthusiasm. It was the outcome of 
his philosophy that, in the words of Dean Stanley, the strong- 



98 English and American Philosophy 

est earthly bond should be identical with the bond of Christian 
fellowship, that the highest earthly power should avowedly 
minister to the advancement of Christian Holiness, that crimes 
should be regarded as sins, and that Christianity should be the 
acknowledged basis of citizenship. On principle he is led to 
discountenance any disposition to stand outside his own party 
standpoint and to judge Christianity impartially; this is incom- 
patible with the cultivation of that feeling of ''intense ad- 
miration" which is the thing most necessary to human per- 
fection. Two current views about the proper relation between 
government and religion were in the field in Arnold's day. One 
was the extreme theory of a supernatural church, to be noticed 
presently in connection with the Tractarian movement; at 
the other extreme lay the purely secular theory which the 
Utilitarians represented. To Arnold both theories were equally 
repugnant; they were the "two great opposite forms of all 
human wickedness." What he wants is to retain the supposed 
advantages of a national concern for religion and morality, 
without tying to any mystical and superstitious notion ; and he 
thinks the only way to do this is in terms of his own concep- 
tion of the Church as a great society for the encouragement of 
goodness and piety. Church and state according to this view 
are not distinct and possibly competing institutions. "A Chris- 
tian society with a general control over human life, with a 
direct interest in the moral welfare of its members, and a 
sovereign power of effecting this welfare by laws, rewards and 
punishments, is already a Church"; the true ideal of the State 
is a Rugby School writ large. Arnold's aim is thus not to 
secularize the Church, but to Christianize the State, and so 
give practical efficacy in England to the faith of those who 
"earnestly look to the Church as the appointed and only 
possible means of all earthly improvement for society." 

One practical question confronts such a theory; what is 
the nature in particular of the ideal which a given society is 
to impress upon its members, and who is to determine it? This 



Thomas Arnold 99 

issue Arnold faces boldly. ''Every people in that country 
which is rightfully theirs may establish their own institutions 
and their own ideas" ; since therefore England is a Christian 
country, it not only has a clear right to make Christianity a 
state religion, but Arnold finds it hard to understand the con- 
dition of mind of any man who could have the least objection to 
this. He even anticipates that the time may come when the re- 
jection of Christianity would be clearly a moral offence, and 
when ''profane writings would be as great a shock to all men's 
notions of right and wrong as obscene writings are now, and the 
one might be punished with no greater injury to liberty of 
conscience than the other." It is his "favorite principle" that 
the "world is made up of Christians and non-Christians; with 
all the former we should be one, with none of the latter. I 
would thank the Parliament for having done away with dis- 
tinctions between Christian and Christian; and I "would pray 
that distinctions be kept up between Christian and non-Chris- 
tian." 

Arnold's theory had little chance of affecting the practical 
course of events. To say nothing of the fact that it proposed 
to maintain or increase civil disabilities whose ultimate dis- 
appearance most liberal minds perceived to be inevitable, its 
very inclusiveness even, as applied to Christians, made it diffi- 
cult to defend on grounds of principle. There may appear some 
justification for compelling a man to subscribe to a creed if you 
believe that in this creed all saving truth is contained; but 
there seems no particular point in such compulsion if the be- 
lief in question is so vague and attenuated that nobody can 
tell precisely what it means in a given man's mouth. "If 
the Arian," says Arnold, "will join in our worship of Christ, 
and will call him Lord and God, there is neither wisdom nor 
charity in insisting that he shall explain what he means by 
these terms." .But when an article of subscription has con- 
fessedly become a formula which anyone is at liberty to inter- 
pret as he pleases so long as he does not deviate from a pre- 



lOO English and American Philosophy 

scribed phraseology, its virtue has about departed. It was 
a much more virile ideal of the Church which was to become 
genuinely an issue in Arnold's day. 

3. For this the occasion was in part the encroachment of 
liberalism upon theology, for which Arnold also stood in a mild 
way, but also and more immediately the threatened invasion 
of the traditional rights of the Establishment at the hands of 
the secular power. For some time ecclesiastical reforms had 
been impending in the political field which were throwing good 
Churchmen into a state of exasperation and alarm. The Ox- 
ford Movement in its inception was a concerted effort to stem 
the tide by infusing a new spirit into the religious life within 
the Church, which should exalt its spiritual power above danger 
from worldly forces. And since it is upon its continuity with 
primitive Christianity that the Establishment bases its special 
claims, a revival of the piety, the enthusiasm, and the consis- 
tency of the church of the early Fathers became the end to 
which a little group of earnest and brilliant Oxford men set 
themselves. 

The starting point of the movement was a man who possessed 
in himself few of the natural gifts of an aggressive partisan 
leader. John Keble is chiefly remembered as a devotional 
poet, who gave expression in his verse with a delicate felicity 
not only to the sentimental side of Anglican ritualism, but 
to that whole quietistic ideal of the traditionally "Christian" 
virtues *whicli did much to give its moral appeal to the new 
movement. In his own character Keble was a compound of 
Christian saintliness, and of an implacable intolerance toward 
whatever lies outside the range of Anglican theology. A second 
and more aggressive leading spirit is Hurrell Froude, a devoted 
friend and follower of Keble. Froude died too early to make it 
possible to assign him his intellectual rank; his Remains, 
published as a campaign document, raised a considerable furor, 
but less from positive qualities of excellence than from their 
outspoken censure of the heroes of the Protestant Reformation. 



John Henry Newman loi 

It was Froude who was responsible for bringing into the move- 
ment the one leader whose abilities are dearly of the first order 
— ^John Henry Newman. The method which after delibera- 
tion was adopted for carrying on the propaganda was the 
publication of a series of small pamphlets — the famous Tracts 
for the Times. In 1835 the Tractarian group received an 
important accession in Edward Bouverie Pusey. Pusey was 
an older man, with high family connections, a reputation for 
learning in certain abstruse fields, an ability to believe with 
perfect conviction what he desired to believe, and much piety 
of the obvious sort. He added therefore great prestige to 
the party, and when later on the exodus to Rome took place he 
was influential in anchoring the bulk of the Tractarians to the 
Anglican communion. 

4. The interest of the Oxford Movement at the present day 
centers almost wholly about the intellectual history of Newman. 
At the start he was of course a firm believer in the Church of 
England. But now for him who holds that the Church is the 
authoritative interpreter of God on earth, there is one awk- 
ward question: which of the numerous churches that exist, 
each claiming alone to possess the truth, is in reality di- 
vinely authorized? Newman felt no difficulty about the 
Protestant denominations; by substituting private judgment 
for authoritative ecclesiastical utterances, they seem clearly to 
be out of the running. But with the Roman Church it is 
different. If one is looking about for the natural marks of a 
representative of God on earth, he can hardly fail to recognize 
the eminent claims of Catholicism. Its universal character, its 
continuous existence, its comparative stability of doctrine, its 
impressive organization and ritual, all are things which a man, 
if he is asking for an agency to do his religious thinking for 
him, will naturally find congenial. Newman could not avoid 
seeing this; and his development records the way in which he 
came to realize that his logical place was not in the Church 
of England, but in the Church of Rome. 



I02 English and American Philosophy 

5. As a philosopher Newman's creed starts from the re- 
pudiation of rationalism in the interests of religious faith. 
Rationalism, as he defines it, is the disposition to demand the 
"how" and "why" of a doctrine before we are willing to accept 
it; faith, on the other hand, is the acceptance of what one's 
reason cannot reach simply upon testimony, the "assenting 
to a doctrine as true which we do not see, which we cannot 
prove, because God says it is true." Before turning to the 
justification which he attempts to give to this attitude, it is 
worth while noting its source in his own personal temperament. 
"The happiest state," he once remarks, "is not that of com- 
manding or directing, but of obeying solely, not having to 
choose for oneself." There is for Newman always something 
good in obedience as such, just as there is something essentially 
wicked in self-assertion, independently of what may turn out 
to be its results. The very principle of sin is insubordination. 
Reverence for the old paths is a chief Christian virtue; curi- 
osity, as tlie expression of an active and independent spirit, 
is man's first and great snare. The love of order is so sacred 
a principle that it finds expression in the nature of God him- 
self; "God voluntarily made promises and put himself under 
engagements, from its being of his very nature to love order 
and rule and subordination for their own sake." Whatever 
comes to us hallowed by the past has a claim upon us simply 
as custom, irrespective of any further claim. Instead of the 
Churchman endeavoring to recommend his position in a round- 
about way, "how much better and more honest to avow that 
it is our duty to stand by what is established till it is proved to 
be wrong, and to maintain customs which we have inherited, 
though it would have been our duty to resist them before they 
were received." So in the practice of the moral life, Newman's 
maxim is always to be on the safe side; this is one motive back 
of his constant leaning toward asceticism. "The Christian 
dares not walk on the edge of a precipice; instead of going to 



John Henry Newman 103 

the extreme of what is allowable, he keeps at a distance from 
evil that he may be safe." 

6. With this temperamental bias as a starting point, what 
Newman as a philosopher is called upon to do is to refute the 
rationalistic principle that our belief should always be propor- 
tional to the evidence, and to show the right of a man to be- 
lieve beyond, and even in opposition to, reason or logic. And 
he proceeds on the basis of two main distinctions. The first is 
the distinction between what he calls real and notional assent. 
Here as he defines it the difference is, that real assent is always 
to the concrete, to the individual, to what can be presented 
to the senses or the imagination, whereas notional assent is only 
to abstractions — the creations in a way of our own minds. The 
important point for Newman, however, goes a little deeper; 
at bottom real assent is that which takes hold of us vitally, 
which stirs our emotions and prompts to conduct, which is 
directed not simply to the true, but to the beautiful, the use- 
ful, the admirable and heroic, to objects that kindle devotion, 
rouse the passions, and attach the affections — a result which 
involves more than the mere presence of a concrete image, 
though sense and imagination supply normally the sort of ob- 
ject most congenial to our emotional and moral nature. And 
the application lies in recognizing that religion — as distinct 
from theology — is always a case of such real assent. 

A second distinction — and this leads to the main point of 
Newman's argument — is that betv/een assent and inference. 
Assent, he holds, as a state of untroubled, undoubting acquies- 
cence, is an act of mind sui generis, to be sharply distinguished 
from that merely conditional acceptance which goes by the 
name of inference, or reason, or logic. It follows that there 
is no such thing as degrees of assent, supposed to be propor- 
tioned to degrees of evidence. When I assent doubtfully, I 
do not assent at all, or, rather, what I do is to assent abso^ 
lutely to the doubtfulness of the proposition; variations of as- 



104 English and American Philosophy 

sent are in reality only assents to a variation in inferences. 
And back of this closing of the mind with truth which assent 
presupposes, there is no more ultimate test. The feeling of 
satisfaction, of intellectual security, the sense of success, at- 
tainment, finality, is the last word in the matter; we have no 
right to say that it must come in this way or in that, but can 
only scrutinize experience to discover how actually it does 
come. Now however it comes, it is not explainable by infer- 
ence as such, because it is always unconditional, whereas in- 
ference is conditional. Inference fails at both ends; it leads 
only to notional truths, to probabilities that stop short of the 
concrete reality with which alone our nature is satisfied; and 
it depends on the prior acceptance of general principles which 
also are notional, and about which men may and do widely dis- 
agree. In real assent inference plays a part, but a very minor 
part. What we call assent is, rather, a concrete, personal, un- 
analyzable act, the reaction of our total constitution to a com- 
plex of probabilities arising out of the circumstances of the 
particular case. To this reaction Newman gives the name 
of the Illative Sense — a name useful perhaps for identifying 
the fact, provided it does not lead us to suppose that we are 
dealing with a peculiar mental faculty to whose simplicity, 
rather than to the subtlety and complexity of the situation, the 
difficulty of analysis is due. 

The general drift of Newman's argument is, then, that the 
primary sources of assent are not logical, but go back rather 
to our emotional and practical nature. "Logic," he writes, 
"makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude; first shoot 
round comers, and you may not despair of converting by a 
syllogism." What the everyday man is after is reality, not 
consistency; whereas logicians are more set upon concluding 
rightly than on right conclusions. Life is not long enough 
for a religion of inferences; we shall never have done begin- 
ning if we determine to begin with proof. The true method 
of reasoning does not depend on logical abstractions, but is 



John Henry Newman 105 

carried out into the realities of life, "its premises being instinct 
with the substance and the momentum, of that mass of proba- 
bilities which, acting on each other in correction and confirma- 
tion, carry home definitely to the individual case." Our con- 
clusion must be no smart antithesis which may look well on 
paper, but the living action of the mind on a great problem 
of fact. Truth is thus attainable, but its rays stream in upon 
us through the medium of our moral as well as of our intel- 
lectual being. 

7. There is obvious truth in Newman's reading of the 
human mind, though it is a truth very easily capable of being 
turned to questionable uses. The fact is that all men do 
bring to their judgments in particular a mass of prepossessions 
which color and shape the issue. This is something from which 
we cannot get away if we would ; but it is far from immaterial 
what attitude we take with reference to it. The attitude to 
which Newman's own fondness for authority leads him is one 
of pious acquiescence in the presence of his temperamental 
leanings. Instead of viewing these impartially and critically, 
and thus giving them the chance to reveal their own possible 
shortcomings, he seeks instead to encourage and strengthen 
them in every way, to protect them from rivalry, to force 
each new fact into their mold without allowing it to take 
its own course and suggest its natural conclusion. This doubt- 
less is what men are as a matter of fact tempted to do; but it 
is the essential aim of liberalism to help them overcome this 
temptation, and form the habit of realizing to themselves sym- 
pathetically points of view other than those most congenial to 
their natural minds. 

8. Put briefly, the application of this theory of belief to 
Newman's positive outcome starts from two great persuasions 
— the reality of God, and the universal fact of human sin and 
misery. The first comes primarily from the experience of 
conscience. For Newman the feelings of obligation, and of 
remorse and guilt when conscience is violated, are inexplicable 



io6 English and American Philosophy 

unless they point to a personal being with whom man stands 
in immediate relations of obedience and devotion. They do 
this not by inference and abstract reasoning, but directly as 
a matter of ''real assent"; just as on the human plane the 
shapes and colors that represent my neighbor's body lead me 
by an instinctive insight to the individual soul behind them. 
The second great fact is that man, by the testimony of all his- 
tory, is clearly in apostasy from God, and so, for the time 
being, cast off from his presence. And the two facts together 
create the presumption which Newman brings to his interpre- 
tation of religious history, the presumption that nothing but 
supernatural interference and an infallible authority — since 
reason has been tried and palpably has broken down — can 
remedy the disaster. If therefore we find an institution pos- 
sessing the actual marks which our presumption would lead us 
to look for, we can accept its claims without hesitation. The 
basis of this confidence is frankly pragmatic; the Catholic 
rehgion is true because its objects control and influence con- 
duct as nothing else does, because it has about it an "odor 
of truth and sanctity sui generis, as perceptible to my moral 
nature as flowers to my sense, such as can come only from 
Heaven." But then all real assent is pragmatic. Meanwhile 
the inability of reason to grasp the full content of revelation 
is no ground for giving up our certainty of its truth, because 
our assent is directed not primarily to the abstract propositions, 
but to the truthfulness of the revealer; and there is no more 
need that it should be affected by the inability of the mind to 
take in the revelation completely, than it is necessary that 
a boy who cannot make his answer to a mathematical problem 
tally with the book should at once distrust the book. 

It may be remarked in passing that Newman's argument, 
whatever its force, is hardly sufficient to justify his own par- 
ticular preference for an external authority in religion. It is 
true that in matters of great moment we wish to give our as- 
sent wholeheartedly and confidently. Religion is not a weigh- 



John Henry Newman 107 

ing of probabilities; it is, or ought to be, a sincere and un- 
hesitating faith. But Newman himself has pointed out a way 
to ground this without the need for resorting to an infallible 
guide. If belief rests in the end upon the sort of person the 
believer is, there is no need that normally it should be hesitat- 
ing and feeble. If it shows itself unstable, the cause lies not 
so much in a deficiency of reason, as in a deficiency in our- 
selves; there is not in us the solidity of aim and of inner tem- 
per sufficient to steady belief, and our uncertainty therefore 
would equally show itself toward the claims of authority. 
True, certainty does not mean infallibility. It is only that 
for the needs of the time being we are convinced, not that we 
have any absolute assurance that this conviction is unshakable 
in the future. But as Newman also has himself remarked, 
such an abstract possibility of mistake is no real drawback 
to the strength of present assent, since this last depends not on 
logic, but on grounds more deeply seated in our constitution. 
Newman's endeavor to construct a theory of certitude which 
shall raise belief in Catholic truth above all other persuasions, 
as something to which we not only assent wholeheartedly, but 
know to be unshakable and final truth, is a total failure; it 
breaks down before the plain fact that the persuasion of certi- 
tude many times in human life is overthrown by growing ex- 
perience, so that in no case can its presence serve as a con- 
clusive test. 

9. One further point in Newman's doctrine has a signifi- 
cance for philosophy. In the course of his drift towards Cathol- 
icism he had felt more and more the need of providing for 
a growing rather than a closed revelation, in order to obviate 
the objection, urged by Protestants, that the Church has added 
to, and so corrupted, the truth of the Gospel. Now the funda- 
mental issue here may be separated from its ecclesiastical set- 
ting. If anyone believes that mankind is on the road to truth, 
he seems bound to recognize as a test something in the nature 
of an objective historical process. He must in other words 



io8 English and American Philosophy 

admit that it is not any private man's judgment, but the de- 
veloping experience of mankind, the collective wisdom of the 
race, the issue of great movements of human thought attested 
by their permanent and settled satisfactoriness, which in the 
end has to be depended on to winnow out falsehood and un- 
certainty. And Newman in his doctrine of Development is 
trying to bring this, the historical test, to the support of 
Catholic claims. The obvious remark to be made about his 
attempt is, not that the test is wholly inapplicable, but that 
he is trying to apply it prematurely and narrowly. Thus he 
has in the first place to assume that historical development 
is always by way of addition, and never of reversal ; if it can be 
shown that the Church has even once in its long history been 
inconsistent with itself, or with the original revelation, he ad- 
mits that he has lost his case. Of course his way is smoothed 
here for him by his rather easy-going theory of evidence, and 
his initial assumption, based on large moral and spiritual 
grounds rather than on the facts, of the extreme improbability 
that inconsistencies will be found in an institution already 
recognized as divine; for he makes it very plain that he does 
not consider any evidence sufficiently "positive and distinct" 
to prove an inconsistency, so long as it is possible by any 
hypothesis, however strained, to bring it into line with his pre- 
suppositions. If one happens not to start with this same as- 
sumption, Newman's treatment of difficulties is thus very likely 
to impress him as a resort to special pleading. "It stands to 
reason," Newman writes for example, in defending the sup- 
posed discovery of the true cross, "which of two parties is the 
more likely to be right on a question of topographical fact — 
men who lived three hundred years after, and on the spot, or 
those who lived at a distance of a thousand, and at the Antip- 
odes"; the value of the whole apparatus of modem scientific 
criticism is thus swept aside with a word. And, in the second 
place, Newman really plays fast and loose with the historical 
argument when he refuses to direct his gaze beyond the field 



W. G. Ward 109 

wherein his own favorite beliefs are found to rule. The his- 
tory of Mankind he expressly limits to the brief and partial 
course of civilization that has culminated in modern Europe; 
and even in Europe the history of Protestant countries is set 
aside as irrelevant. 

10. One other philosopher of real attainments is to be 
found among the Tractarians — William George Ward. Ward 
is next to Newman the most interesting figure in the Move- 
ment; he combines great mental sincerity and frankness with 
logical acuteness of a high order, and with a bluff spontaneity, 
and a zest for the human and the secular, which contrasts re- 
freshingly with the thinness and occasional acerbity of the 
sacerdotal temper. Ward admitted freely that he did not 
himself possess the gift of saintliness. This however did not 
prevent him from admiring and reverencing with a peculiar in- 
tensity the austerity of the ascetic and saintly character; and 
it was the absence of any provision for this in the Anglican 
church which turned his eyes to Rome. His Ideal of a Chris- 
tian Church is a powerful indictment of the smugness and 
self-complacency of the English system, the absence in it of 
any adequate means of moral or spiritual discipline, the sub- 
servience to rank and wealth, and, in general, the "heavy, un- 
spiritual, unelastic, prosaic, unfeeling, immeaning Protestant 
spirit"; and he argued that only by learning from Rome, where 
the claims of holiness, humility, unworldliness, and mystic 
contemplation were recognized and provided for, could England 
hope to save her soul. The book proved one of the turning 
points in the history of the movement; it helped to force the 
hands of Newman, and to precipitate the great secession, Ward 
himself being among the first to go. 

Philosophically Ward's defence of authority follows much 
the lines of Newman, with perhaps a greater relative emphasis 
on the way in which belief is dependent on a practical life of 
devotion and obedience. Since it is conscience rather than 
reason which brings men into contact with the realities of re- 



no English and American Philosophy 

ligion, it is absurd to suppose that the right way to investi- 
gate religion is to give up its practice for an attitude of 
rational impartiality, and so turn it provisionally into a mat- 
ter of sceptical doubt ; this would be as if one were to shut his 
eyes that he might do full justice to arguments intended to 
convince him that a tree within ten yards of him does not 
really exist there. Ward also comes into contact with the 
secular currents of English philosophy, in connection with a 
long continued critical attack upon the underlying principles 
of the sensationalists, more particularly of J. S. Mill. Here 
his general thesis is, that the foundations of a Catholic phi- 
losophy are already admitted in our necessary acceptance of 
certain truths on the basis of an unproved intuition; and along 
this line he criticizes acutely Mill's attempt to find a purely 
empirical source for truths such as those of mathematics and 
of causal law. That on which Ward more particularly rests 
his case, as at once simple and conclusive, is the fact of 
memory. Unless we accept the pronouncement of memory as 
to the reality, not merely of the present impression about a 
past event, but of the actual existence of that event in the past, 
we are incapable of taking a single step in the way of reason- 
ing; and this conviction has absolutely no warrant from "ex- 
perience" — which can only become experience by taking it for 
granted, — or from anything save the self-evidence of its own 
claim. It of course follows that for Ward moral truths also 
are the products of this gift of intuition — a thesis which he 
uses effectively to overthrow the theological doctrine that they 
are established by the arbitrary will of God. 

§ 2. Liberalism in Theology. Coleridge. Mawice. 
Matthew Arnold 

I. While Tractarianism in its later history was tending 
more and more to become a matter of ecclesiastical politics 
rather than of ideas, another form of religious philosophy was 



Wordsworth 1 1 1 

extending its influence with permanent effects on the recon- 
struction of Christian doctrine. For one important source of 
this new tendency, it is necessary to turn back to certain 
aspects of the romantic movement at the beginning of the 
century. It has appeared that, according to the traditional 
theory accredited to Locke, and adopted by the associationists 
generally, the mind is originally a sheet of white paper. On 
it various occurrences in the outer world impress themselves, 
leaving this or that particular sensation or idea, by the com- 
bination of which sensations into complex objects all the con- 
tent of knowledge arises; to understand the soul and its life, 
therefore, is to conduct an analysis of it into its primitive con- 
stituents. Long before this ceased to be the dominant principle 
of psychological science, its deficiencies were expressed with 
great force and vividness by the poet Wordsworth. For 
Wordsworth, man is no complex of atomic sensations, but a 
unitary and living soul, capable of reaching out far beyond 
the meagre results of analytical and logical reasoning, guided 
by warm feeling, and seeking for beauty and significance 
rather than for mere scientific law and classified fact. On 
this new psychological basis Wordsworth had rested a philos- 
ophy of nature as well, sharply opposed to the current creed. 
The world of nature is not an intricate piece of mechanism. 
Its true reality is spiritual ; and with this spirit man may com- 
mune with immediate sympathy and delight, and in so com- 
muning may grow in wisdom through a process of unconscious 
receptiveness far surer and more expeditious than science can 
insure. 

2. The influence which Wordsworth exerted over the 
thought of the nineteenth century, though very considerable, 
is for the most part too indirect and pervasive to be traced 
with much precision. In the case of Wordsworth's friend 
Coleridge a much more visible line of influence is discernible. 
Coleridge's philosophy, in its most general terms, may be 
defined as an attempt to put life into the dry bones of the 



112 English and American Philosophy 

political, religious, and literary orthodoxy of his day, to 
internalize accepted truth, and translate it back into the per- 
sonal experience out of which it arose. Here for example is a 
religious doctrine — say the doctrine of the Atonement. The 
common theologian regarded it as a statement of events that 
took place in the courts of heaven, a legal transaction between 
the persons of the Trinity; for Coleridge, to be worth holding 
at all, it must symbolize rather some vital fact in a man's 
own inner life. The ground for the prevalent narrow and 
arid conception of religion Coleridge found in particular in 
wrong conceptions of the Bible; and perhaps the most im- 
portant single thing in his religious teaching was his protest 
against the bibliolatry of the popular religion — the theory of 
a ''superhuman Ventriloquist," — ^and his influence in getting a 
hearing for a less magical theory of inspiration. For Coleridge, 
the test of truth is not authority or miracle, but the ability 
to find men, and affect their conduct and emotions. 

The tool which Coleridge brought to the task of reconstruct- 
ing theology was the transcendental philosophy of Germany; 
though probably even before he became acquainted with this, 
his mind was set in very much the same direction under the 
influence of Platonizing thought. His philosophy was never 
worked out systematically, and it is possible that the loss is 
not a great one; Coleridge's power lies in flashes of concrete 
insight rather than in connected reasoning. The one chief 
point on which his treatment turns is the distinction between 
two levels of the intellectual life — the Understanding, and the 
Reason. By Understanding, Coleridge means roughly the 
processes of scientific generalization, where we start with par- 
ticular facts, and then go on to systematize them by comparing 
and combining. For Coleridge, however, there is another and 
higher type of knowledge, though of the exact nature of this, 
as a matter of technical philosophy, he is not successful in 
giving a very lucid account. Reason is in the first place held 
to be constituted by ultimate principles of our rational nature, 



t 



Coleridge 113 

which are necessary for making even the facts of the under- 
standing really intelligible. These cannot come from the 
senses; "the solution of phenomena can never be derived from 
phenomena." Since they are what we bring to the understand- 
ing of the world, in the nature of the case they are ultimate 
and underivable, else we should have the "absurdity of de- 
manding proof for the very facts which constitute the nature 
of him who demands it." But now also there is another way 
of looking at the distinction which has no specially self-evident 
connection with the metaphysical account. This is essentially 
identical with Wordsworth's teaching, and may be described 
not inaccurately in terms of the common distinction between 
knowledge, and wisdom. Wisdom in this sense has to do not 
merely with seeing things as a whole from some central point 
of view; this central standpoint is preeminently a matter of 
valuation. "My opinion is this," Coleridge writes to his friend 
Thomas Poole, "that deep thinking is attainable only by a 
man of deep feeling, and that all truth is a species of revela- 
tion." The true end of philosophy is to "make the reason 
spread light over the feelings, and to make our feelings, with 
their vital warmth, actualize our reason." The special meta- 
physical groimd for this he finds in the adoption of the Kantian 
or Fichtean doctrine of the supremacy of the Moral Reason. 
The highest Reason is not a fact of knowledge, but a form of 
living. "The practical Reason alone therefore is Reason in 
the full and substantive sense; the Theoretic Reason as the 
ground of the Universal and Absolute in all logical Conclusions 
is rather the Light of Reason in the Understanding." 

About the final philosophical implications of this theory of 
knowledge Coleridge professes himself not very vitally con- 
cerned. What he insists upon is the validity of the rational 
principles which we bring to the interpretation of the world, 
and their practical subordination to the moral insight; whether 
now the ultimate ideals of Reason are to be regarded as reg- 
ulative only — as mere functions of the mind, — or as con- 



114 English and American Philosophy 

stitutive and actual, one in essence with the power and life 
of nature, as Plato teaches, he conceives is of living interest 
only to the philosopher by profession. Personally he ranges 
himself on the side of the Platonists; Reason in man he con- 
ceives to be the true revelation of a Living Power which, as 
self-conscious will and intelligence, meets man face to face in 
nature, and communes with the spiritual principle in him. One 
may have a grounded faith in religion without this speculative 
justification; but it has its religious value nevertheless. And 
in particular it becomes a matter of direct importance on the 
negative side, as a weapon against a competing philosophy. In 
his attack upon the mechanistic doctrines of science, the prac- 
tical and speculative interests join hands. To Coleridge, as a 
protagonist of spirit and the ideal. Hartley's mechanical con- 
ception of a world "left a lifeless Machine whirled about by 
the dust of its own Grinding" seems in self-evident opposition 
to all the genuine demands of the soul. The universe, if sci- 
ence is the last word, is like a "string of blind men each holding 
to the skirt of the man before him reaching far out of sight, 
but all moving on without the least deviation in one straight 
line. It would be naturally taken for granted that there was a 
guide at the head of the file; what if it were answered — No! 
sir, the men are without number, and infinite blindness supplies 
the place of sight?" 

3. The practical bearing of Coleridge's philosophy, as issu- 
ing in particular in that spirit of historical reverence which 
lies close to the center of the Coleridgian point of view, and 
which is characteristic of its later theological developments, 
comes to light most conspicuously in his political theory. The 
radicals in their desire for reform had fixed their eyes too 
exclusively, he thought, on the defects of existing conditions. 
But society cannot thrive on criticism alone; it must have 
positive bonds of union. And these bonds for the mass of 
men are historically founded. There is need for the cultivation 
of an inner spirit of loyalty and social feeling if society is to 



Coleridge 115 

hang together; and this is the product necessarily of concrete 
social conditions. In making a wholesale attack upon the past, 
the reformers were unconsciously cutting the ground from un- 
derneath the realization of their own professed ideals; their 
work of criticism needs to be supplemented by a more positive 
interpretation of the real values embodied in the past. It was 
not that Coleridge was satisfied with the existing state of 
England. But he thought the trouble was not that institutions 
were bad, but that the ideas originally underlying them had 
been forgotten. Instead of rejecting them, therefore, with all 
their possibilities of effectiveness through their hold on the 
mass of men, the true method of reform is, by a renewed in- 
sight into the inner spirit of the institution, to revive the 
significance for human life which it must originally have had. 
Instead of beginning in political science with abstract prin- 
ciples of reason, the true starting point is the philosophic idea, 
or purpose, to which concrete institutions give expression. 
The truth of this is proved progressively by its success in 
throwing light upon the actual facts; while also it supplies an 
immanent principle of criticism for testing and getting rid of 
whatever thwarts the underlying purpose, and so makes prog- 
ress possible. And there is of course much sound philosophy 
here. Two things it sets itself against — the supremacy of 
unthinking habit and prejudice, and the supremacy of un- 
disciplined feelings ; it demands in both cases the addition of a 
third essential — enlightened insight. To those who acquiesce 
even in good custom, Coleridge brings the demand that also 
we should discover the rational ground of our acquiescence; 
radicalism and Jacobinism, on the other hand, seemed to him 
equally, though in a very different way, to be dispensing with 
reason, and to call urgently for "law and light," as against 
the dominance of shapeless feelings, sentiments and impulses. 
To "hurrying enlighteners" and "revolutionary amputators" 
he presents the rational claims of the gradual processes of 
nature, and the "historical spirit." 



ii6 English and American Philosophy 

There are, however, distinct possibilities of danger in the 
type of political philosophy which Coleridge recommends. 
The discovery that institutions are intelligible, when we had 
only been in the habit of regarding them either as authoritative, 
or as objectionable, is very likely, in the man of speculative 
interests, to give them a new and peculiar hold upon the 
mind, which may easily come to compete with another stand- 
ard. This is the Benthamite standard which tests institutions 
by the concrete practical effects we can trace on the everyday 
happiness of ourselves and other human beings, as against 
the larger, more intellectual, more abstract and grandiose test 
of conformity to some ideal type which history, or theory, has 
implanted in our minds. In this way it is very possible that 
the philosopher of society may become too tender of the 
"idea" — the theoretical justification of the institution in terms 
of its abstract speculative merits, or its historical and cultural 
associations — in comparison with concrete wrongs that indi- 
viduals may be suffering. The task of emphasizing the good 
points of the status quo is one that needs doing, and it may be 
regarded as fortunate that there are those who find it con- 
genial; but it is a drawback that it seems so often to require a 
belief in the intellectual finality of the products of the past, 
which one has only to live a sufficient number of years to find 
disproved by the course of events. It is significant that in 
most of the changes which Coleridge himself opposed, in the 
full confidence that he was doing God and philosophy service, 
history has already decided against him. 

4. Both the strength and the weakness of Coleridge's phi- 
losophy are exemplified in a group of theologians who were 
instrumental in bringing it to bear upon English religious 
thought, and of whom Frederick Denison Maurice is the 
most important. It is natural that the religious innovator 
should show a tenderness for familiar forms of belief and 
worship, and should prefer wherever possible to keep his new 
wine in old bottles. But the consequence of this is seldom 



F. D. Maurice 117 

favorable to the integrity of the intellectual life. Take as an 
example Coleridge's attitude toward the doctrine of the Trinity. 
Coleridge held it greatly important that we refuse to give up 
this doctrine; it would, he thought, be a fatal sacrifice of high 
spiritual truth. And what now is this truth when it is reduced 
to philosophical form? "My faith," says Coleridge, "is this: — 
God is the Absolute Will ; it is his Name and the meaning of it. 
It is the Hypostasis. As begetting his own Alterity, the Je- 
hovah, the Manifested, he is the Father; but the Love and 
the Life — the Spirit — ^proceeds from both." It is difficult not 
to suspect that Coleridge is yielding here to the temptation 
to allow the play of the metaphysical fancy to delude him into 
thinking he has discovered sound reason for holding to a 
belief whose real force lies only in its familiar associations. 
And the intellectual cloudiness which this will surely beget 
nowhere shows itself so conspicuously in alliance with real 
ability as in Maurice. 

Maurice was one of the influential personalities of his day. 
He managed to convey to many impressionable natures a 
peculiar sense of profundity and spiritual insight; and some- 
thing of this he did undoubtedly possess. But with the best 
will to give Maurice his due, it is impossible to deny that he 
is often very provoking. One reads page after page marked 
by impressive earnestness, a sense of fateful issues, a high 
ethical purpose, only at the end to find himself asking in 
some perplexity just what it is all about. Such is the con- 
tumelious spirit of average mankind, that this difficulty in 
shaping a clear-cut and unambiguous issue ends by weakening 
interest in the prophet's message. What at bottom Maurice 
was trying to express is after all, apparently, not very difficult 
to understand. In the large he wants to maintain that re- 
ligion is a life, rather than a matter either of historical or of 
logical evidence; and a life having its source in a Power not 
ourselves making for peace and happiness. Truth is not a 
prisoner at the bar awaiting with some apprehension our 



ii8 English and American Philosophy 

human verdict; it is the great soul of the universe which en- 
velops us and puts forth its fruits through us. It is something 
which is positive, not negative; which we should aim to em- 
brace in its fulness rather than try to pare down to a minimum; 
which does not wait on reasoned proof and critical weighing 
of evidence, but makes its immediate impression on the heart 
and conscience. Faith is not, as Protestant theologians had 
tended to regard it, the ground of our salvation, as if it were a 
constitutive power and made the thing to be. It is a mere 
power of recognition, and points to a foregone reality; the 
real center of religion is a Living Being whom to know is life. 
Or as a disciple of Maurice puts it, "Our grasp of the thought 
can never be worth much; it is the grasp of the Truth upon 
us that men are willing to die for." 

But Maurice begins at once to make trouble for himself. 
In the legitimate desire to give to truth an objective and his- 
torical backing, he chose, as Newman did, to take the stand 
that tradition has in its favor every material presumption ; and 
he will never therefore, if he can help it, let new truth shape 
its own form and expression. And the reasons which he has 
for this attitude are not without force. Belief in fixed articles, 
Maurice argues, enables me to believe the world is progressive, 
not stationary. If after nearly six thousand years we assume 
nothing is known about questions of most concern, we shall 
not expect that anything will be known. The best way to 
advance in truth is, then, not to regard with a suspicious 
eye all past attainment, and refuse to utilize it until it has 
produced its full credentials; we must first accept it in the 
large before we can build upon it, and so appreciate the real 
force of its evidence. Any other course is to make a stumbling 
block out of what ought to be a spiritual help. The answer 
to this however is the same as in Newman's case; whatever 
presumption there is in general that mankind has attained to 
truth, the identification of the results of the education of 
humanity with the Anglican formularies is too hasty. And the 



F. D. Maurice 119 

insistence that always we should find a home for every aspect 
of truth within the sacred phraseology sanctioned by the 
Church is bound to lead to just the result Maurice deprecates 
■ — subtle casuistries, unprofitable disputes about the meaning 
of words, an emphasis on the letter before we are free to 
emphasize the spirit. For the controversial mind this issues 
in all sorts of makeshifts not stopping short of intellectual dis- 
honesty; Maurice is not himself a controversialist, but the 
outcome in his case is perhaps even more dangerous in its 
ultimate tendency. It leads him, that is, to deprecate any 
disposition to put the issue sharply, or to allow the mind to 
range beyond what makes for religious edification. It is this 
dislike of facing issues, rather than any unavoidable obscurity 
in his own positive beliefs, that is responsible for Maurice's 
pervading cloudiness. Thus his own views were strongly in 
the direction of the new and freer conception of the Scriptures. 
But instead of coming to the aid of Colenso, he takes the side 
of his enemies, not because Colenso 's criticisms are mistaken, 
but because the moral lessons of the Bible are so greatly more 
important than questions of literal accuracy, that doubts 
about the latter ought to be kept as much as possible in the 
background. A remark of Maurice's in this connection is a 
commentary on his position; the subject of inspiration, he says, 
is one "for prayer, not for definition." People who like to 
start with definitions — who like, that is, to know approxi- 
mately what they are talking about — ^will not find this accept- 
able. 

The ineffectualness to which such a temper of mind will 
lead is illustrated again in Maurice's social interests. Maurice 
may be regarded as the founder of Christian Socialism; it was 
he who gave it it" name, intending this, as he says, to commit 
the movement to a conflict "with the unsocial Christians and 
the unchristian Socialists." Here his peculiarity of mind shows 
in the tendency to think that if he can identify, in some com- 
plex existing institution, any point of community with an ab- 



I20 English and American Philosophy 

stract spiritual ideal, he forthwith has justified its right to 
continued existence. Thus aristocracy must have its place in 
the state, because there is needed a witness to the lordship 
of the spirit over the flesh. The sovereignty of the people, 
on the other hand, he repudiates as at once the "silliest and 
most blasphemous of all contradictions"; and the reason is 
that all sovereignty is by grace of God. How far removed 
from a comprehension of the real political and industrial situa- 
tion such a mental attitude leaves Maurice and men like him, 
is not obscurely suggested by setting alongside its seething 
forces and complicated problems the list of benefits which he 
congratulated himself had been the outcome of Christian So- 
cialism — Sunday a day of rest, intemperance checked, po- 
litical agitation discouraged, and a number of workingmen led 
to see the folly and danger of strikes. 

5. The intellectual instability which thus characterized 
most of the constructive religious thinking of the middle of the 
century, with its attempt to retain dogmas while emptying 
them of any content which the average churchman could lay 
his finger on with the certainty that he knew with what he 
was dealing, had several consequents, or sequents, which 
Maurice could not have contemplated with entire complacency. 
One of these was the disposition to set aside the reconstruction 
of theology altogether, and to occupy oneself with practical 
religion in the form of Christian service. A striking repre- 
sentative of this tendency is Charles Kingsley, himself a dis- 
ciple of Maurice, and his co-worker in the field of Christian 
Socialism. Kingsley represents, very nearly at its best, the 
utilization of religious sentiment, and a rousing appeal to the 
better side of human nature, for the active work of the 
preacher of righteousness. Let us get enthusiastically together 
and do something for the glory of God, and matters of theory 
will look after themselves. But if one stops to think for a 
moment instead of being carried off his feet, he will perhaps 



Charles Kingsley 121 

begin to wonder how much in the way of a doctrinal creed 
and ecclesiastical organization he is thus letting himself in for. 
A call to men to abandon unprofitable controversy, and to 
enlist under the banner of a great historic Church in the 
warfare for human good, is likely to forget that the Church 
is no mere ideal of fellowship, but a very concrete and defi- 
nitely constituted social institution; and if any one did have a 
selfish interest in keeping its historic features unaltered, he 
could hardly hope for circumstances more favorable to his 
aims than that men generally should eschew the exercise of the 
critical intellect, and throw themselves without reserve into 
schemes of practical philanthropy under its leadership. 

6, A different form, much simpler than that adopted by 
Maurice, of the attempt to make religion a life and not a 
system, may likewise be used to cover up the extent of the 
break from orthodox Christianity. This is to retain, not the 
church, nor the creed, nor the Bible, but the historical Jesus 
as the central object and practical source of authority in 
religion. This very indefinite theory of authority as located 
in the moral personality of Christ became an issue in the 
sixties in connection with the publication of an anonymous 
volume— its author was Professor John R. Seeley — which for a 
time was the subject of much discussion and much vitupera- 
tion; Lord Shaftesbury, for example, the recognized leader of 
the Evangelicals, speaks of it rather excitedly as the "most 
pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of hell." Ecce 
Homo is an attempt at an historical reconstruction of primitive 
Christianity, under the guidance of moral preferences rather 
than of a critical apparatus; its interest is to set before us 
the human side of Jesus, leaving the validity of dogmatic re- 
ligion discreetly in the background. The same lack of sharp 
definition characterizes Seeley's later book on Natural Religion. 
Natural religion — the worship, that is, or enthusiastic con- 
templation, of whatever in the known universe appears worthy 



122 English and American Philosophy 

of worship — is and is not sufficient; it is the one essential and 
necessary thing in religion, while it still must not be under- 
stood as at all denying the worth of a supernatural revelation. 
7. Meanwhile the tenuous and uncertain character which 
theology was coming to take on under the influence of liberal- 
ism was not without its effect in a more practical direction. 
It need not prove surprising if, especially in the case of men 
actively engaged in administering the machinery of the Church, 
a spirit of opportunism were to be encouraged by the increas- 
ing fluidity of doctrine. The best illustration of this last 
tendency is to be found in Benjamin Jowett, the celebrated 
Master of Balliol, and a powerful force in the ranks of liberal- 
ism. One of the striking features of Jowett's mind is his con- 
scious justification of such an opportunism, as against what he 
considers an unhealthy scrupulosity. Here is an institution 
existing with immense power in the community for valuable 
ends; who is to have the direction of the forces which it em- 
bodies? Shall we allow petty scruples to throw power into 
the hands of those who •will use it against reason and freedom, 
or shall we waive questions of technical honesty, and accom- 
plish good by accepting conditions as they stand? Jowett's 
answer is made easier by his personal temperament. His mind 
is a good deal of the t5^e of Doctor Johnson's, for whom he 
had a great admiration; "common sense" is his final court of 
appeal. This is the outcome of his long wrestle with phi- 
losophy — the conclusion that metaphysics really have no 
standing. "Common sense may receive a slight enlargement 
from them, and indeed some knowledge of them is necessary 
to enable the mind to get rid of them. But I think the vulgar 
are right in regarding them as a forbidden kind of knowledge 
which is of most use after it has been forgotten." 

But now common sense often means, in practice, that on 
which the great majority are agreed; and accordingly we find 
Jowett using this consciously as his test in matters of con- 
duct as well. In this way conformity is turned into something 



Benjamin Jowett 123 

like an ideal good; "singularity is of itself an evil." Too 
much enthusiasm is of doubtful benefit; unworldliness a posi- 
tive vice. One of the great truths of religion is "resignation 
to the general fact of the world and of life"; and under title 
of "the world," Jowett clearly covers something of what the 
religious mind is wont to call the "worldly." It follows that 
we may easily be over-conscientious; a tender conscience is a 
"conscience imequal to the struggles of life." If we find our- 
selves with scruples and would resolve them, Jowett advises us 
not to depend too much upon our own judgment, but to look 
about us and see if respectable people generally are troubled 
about the thing; if not, we are only making ourselves "singu- 
lar" by raising the question. And for common sense there is a 
further test — success. If we are not recognized by the world 
there must be something lacking in us, when only that is good 
which is generally recognized as good. "I was much more 
pleased with him than I expected to be," Jowett writes of a 
man he had recently met, "having, you know, a general 
prejudice against all persons who do not succeed in the world." 
Backed by this philosophy, Jowett has no great difficulty in 
reconciling himself to the situation in the English Church. It 
was not indeed quite an atmosphere of frankness and openness ; 
but influence is worth a sacrifice. And if one needs further 
justification, it is comforting to reflect that one does not stand 
alone. Free-thinkers are not more nearly touched than high 
Churchmen, or than the Evangelicals by the Baptismal Serv- 
ice; "though I dislike Subscription, I am inclined to think that 
if we are all dishonest together, that proves us to be all honest 
together." 

8. While the defenders of ecclesiasticism on the one hand, 
and of a Coleridgian spiritualism on the other, were each trying 
to shape Anglican thought, the older and simpler type of 
rationalistic or semi-rationalistic liberalism was never without 
its influence; and this influence, particularly in connection with 
the modification of views about inspiration and the Scriptures, 



124 English and American Philosophy 

began in the latter part of the century to make rapid inroads 
upon traditional belief. The year i860 saw the appearance 
of a cooperative volume entitled Essays and Reviews, which 
deserves mention as marking an epoch in the development of 
religious liberalism, not on account of any novelty in what it 
had to say, but because it was a move in the direction of break- 
ing up the general conspiracy of evasiveness and timid silence 
about matters of scientific criticism long since taken for 
granted on the continent. Of the writers, three in particular 
gave other important assistance to the liberal cause, Jowett by 
scholarly contributions to the historical appreciation of New 
Testament theology, Baden Powell by an endeavor to rest 
religion on the acceptance of scientific law rather than on 
miracle, and Mark Pattison by numerous essays in which learn- 
ing and an open mind are combined with literary skill of a 
high order. 

Of somewhat more interest for philosophy is the appearance 
here and there of a spirit of rationalism which refused to re- 
main within the boundaries even of a liberalized orthodoxy, 
and which issued in pure theism, or in a combination of moral 
fervor with theological agnosticism. An interesting repre- 
sentative of this tendency in the early part of the century is 
Blanco White. Brought up to become a priest in Catholic 
Spain, and sickened by contact with ecclesiastical corruption 
and superstition, he repudiated his vows at some personal risk 
and fled to England, where he became a force of importance 
in the current of free opinion that was beginning to stir at Ox- 
ford. White's intellectual history is a chequered one; but 
after passing from Catholicism to atheism, and thence to a 
moderate Anglicanism, he finally settled down as a Unitarian 
to a philosophical theism which repudiated authority of any 
sort, and reduced Christianity to an ideal of religious liberty, 
under acknowledgment of God as father, and of conscience as 
his voice. Another thinker of the same general temper is 
Francis W. Newman, a brother of Cardinal Newman. New- 



The Rationalists 12^ 

man also sets aside the authority of creeds, of the Church, 
of the Bible, eveii of Christ; it is impossible to build a religion 
of authority upon free inquiry. God is left the central article 
of his creed; and the fruits of religion depend without any 
mediation whatever on the heart's belief in the sympathy of 
God v/ith the individual man. White and Newman had a 
follower in Frances Power Cobbe, who was influenced also 
by the American Unitarian leader, Theodore Parker, In 
Parker, and in his friend William Henry Channing, a similar 
form of rationalistic theism is to be found, Parker being rather 
the more radical of the two. 

9. Two other names may be noticed most conveniently in 
this connection ; both made their mark as men of letters rather 
than as theologians, but their early days were spent in the 
atmosphere of religious controversy, and both contributed to 
the literature of theological unrest. James Anthony Froude, 
the historian, was a brother of Hurrell Froude, and had himself 
been implicated for a time in the Tractarian Movement; but 
he soon left it far behind. His Nemesis of Faith is a novel 
intended to show the danger of tying up religion to theological 
dogma. Later on Froude adopted wholesale the moral tran- 
scendentalism of Carlyle, but succeeded in turning it into a 
rather commonplace apology for taking life much as we find 
it, and acquiescing in such social conventions as stand in good 
repute. What in Carlyle was an active moral call upon the 
possessor of preeminent gifts to serve his fellows, is in Froude 
hardly more than a worship of power as a synonym of success, 
and an impatience with the demands of the unsuccessful; 
while the Carlylese distaste for the critical intellect passes into 
a mere instinctive dislike of innovation. 

10. In Matthew Arnold there is a far more genuine and 
permanent concern for the religious problem. Arnold indeed 
proved to be one of the most powerful of the influences that 
helped to shape the form of liberal religion outside the bounds 
of historical Christianity. As a poet he had already given 



126 English and American Philosophy 

expression to the sentimental side of a decaying faith; though 
it is clear from the whole tenor of his mind, a mind profoundly 
conservative, and sensitive to aesthetic impressions from the 
heritage of the past, that the disappearance of familiar land- 
marks, rather than any deep attachment to the Christian 
belief as such, was the source of his melancholy. Consequently 
there is no occasion for surprise if in the prose writings which 
constitute his contributions to religious thought his mood 
should have changed completely, with no trace now visible of 
hesitation or regret. 

The requirement which Arnold makes of religion is that it 
shall be a matter of first-hand, verifiable experience. The 
traditional creed of Christianity is not of this sort. It is the 
product partly of a materialized imagination suited to our 
crude personal hopes and fears, partly of metaphysical reason- 
ings which not one man in a thousand can even follow intelli- 
gently, and which in any case have to do with matters totally 
incapable of proof. God as a moral and intelligent Governor 
of the universe, a magnified and non-natural man, is some- 
thing to which we cannot possibly stand in any experienced 
relation. What then is there in religion which is the object 
of such an immediate experience? It is, says Arnold, the cer- 
tainty that righteousness is the law alike of our own being, and 
of the world. We know this primarily because we actually 
find it true that moral conduct brings peace and happiness, 
whereas unrighteousness fails of its desired reward. But we 
also know that this is no mere subjective and personal fact, 
because we have continual evidence how little our happiness 
depends upon ourselves. In the first place we did not make 
ourselves; we did not bring it about that the sense of suc- 
ceeding, going right, hitting the mark in conduct, should give 
satisfaction. And furthermore our performance is not wholly 
or even nearly wholly in our own power. Our conduct is 
capable of almost infinitely different degrees of force and 
energy, and this energy springs mysteriously from sources back 



Matthew Arnold 127 

of our conscious and voluntary will. To put ourselves in line 
then with this law of the universe, to attain the sense of 
harmony v/ith the universal order, is what religion calls find- 
ing God. For religious experience God is simply the fact, 
independent of metaphysical argument or of popular anthropo- 
morphism, that there are fundamental ethical laws which rule 
our lives. God is the Power not ourselves that makes for 
righteousness, the stream of tendency by which all things 
strive to fulfil the law of their being. This may seem to be 
reducing religion to morality; in a sense it is, in so far as the 
content of religion goes. But there is a real difference in the 
way in which this content makes its appeal to us; religion is 
morality indeed, but morality heightened, enkindled, lit up by 
feeling — morality touched by emotion. The difference is better 
illustrated than defined. " 'Hold off from sensuality,* says 
Cicero, 'for if you have given yourself up to it you will find 
yourself unable to think of anything else.' That is morality. 
'Blessed are the pure in heart,' says Jesus Christ, 'for they 
shall see God.' This is religion. 'We all want to live honestly, 
but cannot,' says the Greek maxim maker. That is morality. 
'O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the 
body of this death!' says St. Paul. That is religion. 'Love 
not sleep, lest thou come to poverty,' is morality; but, 'My 
meat is to do the will of him who sent me, and to finish his 
work,' is religion." 



CHAPTER IV 
NATURALISM AND EVOLUTION 

§ I. Thomas Buckle. Darwin and Evolution 

I. Even while the prestige of John Stuart Mill was at its 
height, a new influence was already making itself felt in the 
currents of naturalistic thought in England — an influence only 
slightly felt by Mill himself — which was to change the whole 
direction and emphasis of the intellectual life. It did this most 
directly and permanently, of course, through bringing the 
notion of development to bear upon all the subjects of human 
inquiry; but also, in a more general way, the theory of evolu- 
tion signalized a certain shift of interest from politics and 
social reform to the objective constitution of the world at 
large. Even before the vogue of evolution, a tendency is 
apparent here and there to turn directly to the impersonal 
truths of science as the liberator of the human spirit from 
the trammels of superstition. For minds in rebellion against 
current theological creeds, it is not difficult to understand how 
the notion that the world, and man's character and destiny 
as a portion of the world, are ruled by Law, might come to take 
on the aspect of a new and glorious revelation. The earlier 
expressions of this are unimportant for philosophy, and amount 
to little more than a glorification in one form or another of 
"necessity" as a great spiritual principle. If one wants an 
illustration of the almost fanatical enthusiasm which this idea 
of necessity is capable of arousing, he may turn to the pages 
of Robert Owen, the philanthropist and socialist. Owen is 

128 



Robert Owen 129 

obsessed with the notion that a belief in free-will is the grand 
source of all evil, and that such a belief has only to be eradi- 
cated to lay a secure foundation for the millenium. Nature 
gives to each man his necessary constitution, and society de- 
termines the particular form this is to take. Once recognize 
this, and straightway it will "effectually destroy all motives to 
individual pride and vanity." No one versed in the true 
knowledge of his nature will think more highly of himself 
than of any of his fellow men; selfishness therefore will at 
once disappear. And as we cannot take pride in ourselves, 
so we have no logical right to blame others for what they 
cannot help. Instead of the impossible attempt to combat 
crime and error by penalties, it will be recognized that society 
alone is responsible for the aberration of individuals; and since 
we are thus "at the mercy of society," all our efforts will go 
to the endeavor by proper social conditions to create a new 
human nature. The "various phases of insanity called re- 
ligion," in particular, appear to Owen as among the chiefest 
sources of divisions among men. "Rejoice," he writes, "all 
ye who have so long desired to see the period arrive when all 
the human race shall become wise and good in habits: for 
this weapon of mighty power has been discovered! Its name 
is TRUTH. Its sharpness and brilliancy, now that it is, for 
the first time, unsheathed to open view, no mortal can with- 
stand." A similarly exaggerated notion of the practical im- 
portance of a belief in necessitarianism appears in a more 
scientific setting in Charles Bray's Philosophy of Necessity, a 
well-meaning piece of dogmatism which trails off into a defence 
of phrenology, and a vague apotheosis of humanity and the 
social whole. A better known writer, though scarcely a safer 
philosopher, is Harriet Martineau, whose Letters on the Law 
of Human Nature and Development is a collection of the 
correspondence between herself and a Mr. Atkinson, wherein 
the two authors congratulate one another on their superior 
attainments, and commiserate a world not yet sufficiently en- 



130 English and American Philosophy 

lightened to appreciate the great necessitarian truths of ma- 
terialism and phrenology. 

An application of this conception of necessary law, drawn 
from the sciences of physical observation, to human history 
on a large scale, is attempted with results more pretentious 
than successful in Thomas Buckle's famous History of Civiliza- 
tion. The influence of the notion, -compounded in part of a 
faith in science, and in part of aesthetic sentiment, of a great, 
iron-bound, self-complete universe having no place in it for 
the free play of human will — a single scene "permeated by 
one glorious principle of universal and undeviating regularity," 
— -is in Buckle complicated by his disposition to look upon 
law as an actual compelling force lurking behind the facts, 
and bending to its will the feeble powers of man. Buckle 
was especially impressed by the revelations of statistical uni- 
formity. That in a given period there are approximately the 
same number of suicides, or that the total number of mar- 
riages seems uninfluenced by the uncertainties of individual 
love-making, is in truth a curious and interesting phenom.enon, 
whose explanation is not wholly on the surface. To Buckle, 
the explanation seemed to be in terms of the utter subordina- 
tion of win to a sort of physical fate. The power of the 
larger law, he says in speaking of suicide, "is so irresistible, 
that neither the love of life, nor the fear of another world, 
can avail anything toward even checking its operation." The 
ultimate dependence of human progress on the physical envi- 
ronment, more particularly on the great factors of Climate, 
Food, Soil, and the General Aspect of Nature, is, accordingly, 
his primary thesis. One of the deductions from this is, that 
in a country subject to startling vicissitudes of nature a 
superstitious habit of mind is bound to be generated, while 
science and reason are the products of nature in a form more 
subdued and regular in its processes. So likewise, more in- 
directly, the development of reason is dependent on the other 
physical factors, through their influence on the accumulation 



Thames Buckle 131 

of wealth. But now once in existence, intellect tends more 
and more to subdue nature, and to bring about a growing 
preponderance of mental over physical laws. It is Buckle's 
special interest to show that in the more favored and pro- 
gressive countries progress depends solely on intellect or sci- 
ence, and not on moral ideas, which last remain approximately 
constant. The advance ,of civilization thus varies directly 
with "scepticism," or the attitude of doubt and investigation, 
and inversely with ''credulity." A similar but far less able 
essay at a deterministic history of civihzation is John William 
Draper's Intellectual Development of Europe, a book contain- 
ing a great mass of information, not always well understood 
by the writer, but negligible as a contribution to science. 

2. It was Darwin's Origin of Species which opened up the 
possibility of a final triumph of science over religion, and the 
substitution of an all-embracing reign of impersonal law for 
supernatural agency, alike by the new prestige which it lent 
to the pretensions of the scientific intellect, and by the weapons 
it afforded in particular against the two main foundations of 
religious belief — the notion of design in nature, and the con- 
ception of man as a being possessed of a spiritual life with 
little or no point of contact with animal existence. The idea 
that species have arisen by a gradual process was of course 
not a novel one, Darwin's own grandfather had suggested 
it; and more recently it had formed the burden of a book 
called Vestiges of Natural Creation, written by a scientific 
amateur, Robert Chambers, which had been the object of much 
discussion on its appearance. A more important essay in the 
same direction, that of the Frenchman Lamarck, who had 
proposed to account for the development of species on the 
theory of effort exerted to satisfy organic appetencies, and 
the use and disuse of organs, had been before the scientific 
world for several decades. But while the more open-minded 
scientists were not unwilling to give the hypothesis a hearing, 
it was the general verdict that the case had not been proven. 



132 English and American Philosophy 

Darwin was successful where Lamarck had failed, by his 
empirical evidence that in Natural Selection we have a vera 
causa capable of explaining at least a part of the effect. Just 
how great a part this particular agency plays in the process 
of evolution Darwin never fully convinced even himself. In 
the earliest edition of the Origin of Species he admits that it 
is in any case no complete explanation; and as time went on 
he was inclined to allow more for the possible importance of 
cooperating factors. He continued to believe however that 
as compared with these, natural selection held at least the 
first place. 

3. The prejudice, at the start the overwhelming prejudice, 
which Darwin's theory had to meet, is of course to be explained 
chiefly by the consequences it was seen or thought to have, 
and in particular by the consequences for religion. Whether 
these consequences really follow from it is indeed a matter 
often and vigorously disputed in the immediately succeeding 
decades; but at first glance, at any rate, there appears good 
ground for the suspicion that it undermines, not revelation 
m^erely, but the whole belief in the existence of God as well, 
since the strongest and most popular argument for a God 
has always started from that evidence of design in the world, 
the organic world in particular, on which natural selection 
seemed to cast doubt. Darwin's own judgment was fluctuat- 
ing. He started in with no prejudice against theism. As a 
young man he had indeed liked the idea of being a country 
clergyman, and had seriously considered entering the Church; 
and it is rather curious that the book which most influenced 
him in his early days was the one that did most to popularize 
the design argument, "I do not think," he says, "I hardly 
ever admired a book more than Paley's Natural Theology; I 
could almost formerly have said it by heart." Nor did he 
ever wholly free himself from the force of the impression 
which the world gives that, in view of the remarkable way it 
has turned out, it must bear some relation to intelligence and 



Charles Darwin 133 

meaning. Thus he speaks of the "extreme difficulty or rather 
impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful uni- 
verse, including man with his capacity of looking far back- 
wards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or 
necessity." 

But with time this feeling, strong when he wrote the Origin, 
tended to become weaker. The more we give our attention 
to the details of the evolutionary process, rather than to 
its large general effects, the more it is apt to appear that the 
natural selection of fortuitous variations weakens seriously the 
force of the supposition that intelligent purpose is at work; 
"there seems to be no more design in the variability of organic 
beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the 
course in which the wind blows." Darwin himself appeals 
more than once to the case of the variations that have been 
utilized by man in artificial selection, as indicating a clear 
lack of intention; "it seems preposterous that a maker of a 
universe should care about the crop of a pigeon solely to please 
man's silly fancies." A further and more positive difficulty 
which had weight with him is the difficulty occasioned by 
the fact of evil. The success of natural selection depends upon 
the existence of an enormous amount of suffering; and to 
reconcile this with a good and benevolent purpose is at best 
an act of faith. To Darwin the difficulty was the more real, 
in that he was susceptible in a peculiar degree to pity for 
suffering and weakness. His sympathies were always easily 
aroused, as is witnessed, for example, by his youthful practice 
of first killing worms in salt water before impaUng them on 
the hook, his gradual discontinuance of the sport of hunting of 
which he was passionately fond, his early inability to stay 
out hospital operations, his eager partisanship on the ques- 
tion of slavery, and the intensity of his loathing for the cruelty 
of certain vivisectors. When therefore he looked to nature, 
he was not disposed to ignore the evidences of evil. And 
although he held strongly to a belief in the predominance of 



134 English and American Philosophy 

the good, he found this more compatible with a theory which 
made pleasure the accompaniment of useful adaptations, so 
that it tends by the blind law of survival to become the rule 
of life, than with a more thoroughgoing and ultimate theodicy. 

While accordingly Darwin is never quite ready to deny 
purpose outright, he is left with no satisfactory intellectual 
reasons for asserting it. To accept it as an active cause for 
phenomena in detail is to abandon scientific explanation, and 
nothing in the concrete situation seems to afford a necessity 
for this; while if one falls back on the general assumption 
that everything alike in the end may have been designed by 
God for the purpose which it actually serves, this amounts 
only to saying that everything is determined to be what it is. 
As for the emotional sense of a divine presence at certain 
exalted moments, Darwin confesses to have felt it at times, 
but it gradually left him with his growing lack of susceptibility 
to the emotional side of life. There still remains the vague 
complex of feeling and reason which shows itself in the dis- 
satisfaction with the notion of an unmeaning universe. But — 
and this is Darwin's last word — here also evolution bids us 
halt, and the "horrid doubt always arises whether the con- 
victions of man's mind, which has been developed from the 
mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trust- 
worthy." 

4. Meanwhile there is another problem, or set of problems, 
growing out of the theory of evolution, on which Darwin was 
bound to have something more definite to say. Evolution 
may seem to affect our estimate not of God only, but of man 
as well. For if man has developed from the brutes, can we 
still suppose him possessed of those distinctive qualities that 
have been held to constitute his peculiar dignity and rank in 
creation? Of such qualities there are two of chief importance 
— reason, and conscience. Man's mental powers, if indeed he 
possesses any not shared with the brutes, Darwin finds ex- 
plainable by the influence of speech or language. Morality 



Charles Darwin 135 

also needs no generically new and human faculty. Briefly, 
it depends on two things in particular, the sympathetic in- 
stincts which man shares with the lower orders, and his 
greater intellectual power — helped out by language — which 
enables him to reflect upon past actions and their motives, 
approving some and disapproving others. The social instincts 
lead a man to take pleasure in the society of his fellows, to 
feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform 
various services in their behalf. Then when the mental fac- 
ulties have become sufficiently developed to make comparison 
possible, images of past actions and motives, and a feeling of 
dissatisfaction such as always results from an unsatisfied in- 
stinct, arise in us when we perceive that this enduring and 
always present social instinct has yielded to some other, 
stronger at the time, but neither enduring in its nature, nor 
leaving behind a very vivid impression. Finally, the power 
of language being acquired so that the wishes of the com- 
munity can be expressed, the common opinion of the way each 
member ought to act for the general good becomes in a para- 
mount degree the guide to action, in the form of a desire for 
social approbation; and this is further reinforced by habit. 



§ 2 . Herbert Spencer 

I. The conception of evolution which Darwin had been 
successful in making for the first time a real scientific issue 
in the biological realm had already taken on a more universal 
form, even before the Origin of Species was published, in the 
mind of Herbert Spencer, in whose Synthetic Philosophy we 
have much the most elaborate and thoroughgoing expression 
of nineteenth century naturalism. Spencer's naturalism is, in 
the main, a lineal descendent of the older English tradition; 
but it has, even apart from the modifications due to the notion 
of development, certain individual peculiarities. Most of these 



136 English and American Philosophy 

have their source in Spencer's own intellectual and moral 
temper. In tracing his genealogy, Spencer calls attention to 
the spirit of non-conformism prominent in his ancestry; and 
this same fondness for opinions which set themselves against 
authority and custom was everywhere in evidence in his own 
character. And what most people hold in a verbal and in- 
nocuous way was with him a rule of action. He disapproved 
of funeral ceremonies, and refused therefore on principle to 
attend them. He did not believe* in the display of a monarch- 
ical government, and would not even witness street parades 
connected with state functions. He felt a strong objection to 
academic degrees, which did not, after the usual fashion, 
cease when he had himself an opportunity to receive them. 
On his generally unresponsive habit of mind toward other 
people's ideas, and his unhesitating readiness to air his dis- 
agreement, his whole life is a commentary. His opinions — 
and he held opinions about everything — he was constitutionally 
incapable of keeping to himself; "whenever I see what seems 
to me an evil," he writes a friend whom he is instructing in 
the proper way to bring up her children, "I cannot avoid 
trying to rectify it." He had, an acquaintance remarks of 
him, a keener desire than most people to get others to carry 
out his views even on quite trivial subjects— how to light a 
fire, how to hang pictures, and the like; and his strong as- 
surance of the inherent rightness of whatever he was per- 
sonally convinced of, and of the importance to the world that 
everyone else should think the same way about it, was apt to 
lend a touch of intolerance to his attitude. Thus he refused 
to give his support to the new philosophical journal Mind, on 
the ground that it "cannot be expected that I should aid the 
survival of a periodical so largely devoted to the expression of 
views diametrically opposed to my own." Whenever in par- 
ticular authorities were set up, Spencer could be counted on 
to be found in the opposition; witness for example his fre- 
quent disparagement of the Old Masters. A few isolated 



Herbert Spencer 137 

points can give however only a slight glimpse of Spencer's dis- 
tinctive character as it stands out in the pages of his Autobiog- 
raphy and in his letters — an upright, self-reUant, unsubmissive 
man, with no reverence in his composition, ready always to 
stand up for what he conceived to be his rights, ambitious intel- 
lectually and with a keen desire for fame and recognition, but 
without the slightest spirit of pretence or display, sacrificing for 
his work the common desire of getting on financially, somewhat 
hard and implacable, more than a little pedantic and old- 
maidish, with an instinctive love for the orderly and patterned 
and a horror of confusion. Of his naturally equable and even 
stolid temperament one may perhaps judge from the anecdote 
which he thinks it worth while to relate, that on a fishing 
trip in Scotland, at the age of thirty-six, he became provoked 
and swore for the first time in his life, being reproved therefor 
by his Scotch companion. Spencer does himself fondly imagine 
that he had the makings of a rather rash and venturesome 
character. He relates two or three incidents in his life very 
circumstantially and with much apparent relish, where he 
seems to have acted without entire regard for consequences. 
But the surprise that he displays, and his labored attempt at 
explanation, are enough to show that of the real spirit of 
impulsiveness he had not the least conception. 

Philosophically there is one obvious drawback attaching to 
Spencer's non-conformist temper, and his inability to learn 
from others. He confesses that he practically never was able 
to read a book with whose position he was not in sympathy; 
and the result is, in matters that lie outside the field of science 
proper, a provincialism which materially lessens the value of 
his conclusions. The very nature of his intellectual life 
history is enough to arouse serious doubt. Here is a young 
man who finds himself holding, rather than thinks himself 
into, a certain — no doubt fruitful and valuable — conception. 
He sits down to work it out as a philosophy, and for over 
fifty years he adds one volume after another. Meanwhile his 



138 English and American Philosophy 

original standpoint never alters. He gets essentially no 
modifying light upon it, meets with nothing which suggests 
to him that it may not be wholly adequate, profits scarcely at 
all from criticisms and objections. This is not the way the 
most comprehensive wisdom is attained. The fundamental 
background of the whole conception is clearly a good deal a 
matter of temperament, never fully and candidly scrutinized 
in the light of a wider human nature; and it is impossible 
to feel entire confidence in a system so limited, and even 
dogmatic in its form. 

2. On its more general and speculative side, Spencer's 
philosophy starts with the metaphysical doctrine of the un- 
knowableness of ultimate reality. The thesis itself is not 
novel; in one form or other it has indeed appeared as the 
prevailing note in both the main lines of speculative thought 
in England from the beginning of the century. Spencer pro- 
fessedly takes his cue from Hamilton and Mansel, and repeats 
their arguments without much attempt at originality. But in 
doing this he succeeds in bringing out even more sharply than 
Hamilton the latent difficulties of the position. For while he 
insists that we can prove our utter incompetence for absolute 
knowledge, it yet appears that the notion of the absolute 
remains as a positive content in our thought, and that we are 
compelled to think, or to hold as certain, not only its ex- 
istence, but several important propositions about it. It is true 
we have no definite idea of this non-relative being, which 
nevertheless by our mental constitution we are forced to postu- 
late; it is present only as a vague and indefinite consciousness. 
But we do not rid ourselves of the contradiction between hav- 
ing and at the same time not having an idea, by making the 
idea very indefinite and obscure. And if, as Spencer urges, 
the arguments for relativity all of them presuppose an absolute 
in the background, the proper conclusion would seem to be, 
not that an absolute must be accepted as an object of thought 



Herbert Spencer 1^9 

by a being who is incompetent to think it, but that our argu- 
ments for relativity need to be revised. 

It would however probably be unjust to Spencer to take 
him here too strictly at his word, and to conclude that because 
of logical complications his metaphysics is to be dismissed as 
meaningless. The doctrine of the Absolute, if one be disposed 
to interpret it sympathetically, contains certain elements which 
are more or less independent of his success at argument. The 
things which it would appear he is really interested in uphold- 
ing are, first, the perception that questions about the intrinsic 
nature of reality stand on a different footing from the questions 
that science tries to answer, and cannot be met on the same 
terms, and, second, that in spite of this we are constrained to 
accept beliefs about the nature of the world, whether or not 
we can prove them, or ''know" them in the scientific sense. 
Now the first point, quite apart from Spencer's labored and 
generally unconvincing arguments about relativity, might be 
thought to follow simply from a description of what scientific 
knowledge for him consists in. It is a knowledge, namely, of 
events, or phenomena, and reduces itself to experienced laws 
of sequence. In the nature of the case, then, if there are ex- 
istences or entities that can be distinguished from their hap- 
penings or activities, they cannot be described in terms of the 
laws of invariable sequence, since these last apply to nothing 
but events, or changes. It does not follow from this that the 
nature of existence is necessarily unintelligible. If we agree 
to call nothing science unless it takes the form of a statement 
about the ordered occurrence of events, and regard as the one 
test of science the experimental test of finding that things 
happen according to prediction, then there can be no scientific 
knowledge of anything that is not an event; but it is at least 
conceivable that knowledge has other content besides these 
experimental laws. 

And whether or not he is himself ready to admit it in words, 



140 English and American Philosophy 

the justification of such elements of real or metaphysical truth 
is precisely the outcome of his doctrine of the Unknowable. 
Spencer's dogged assertion of the real existence of a Power or 
World Energy behind the phenomenal show of the evolutionary 
process can at best only verbally be distinguished from a bit 
of absolute knowledge. This confidence in an objective fact 
of real existence more fundamental than human experience, 
and than the phenomenal sequences which science formulates, 
is what enables him, even though it is with some loss of con- 
sistency, to escape from the thoroughgoing unreality doctrine 
which his principles at first seem to suggest; and it keeps his 
general philosophical results after all truer to our common 
convictions than many far more subtle and logically consistent 
systems which, in their eagerness to avoid "dualism," leave in 
obscurity the relation between those two plain facts of common 
experience— man with his particular fleeting conscious life, 
and the vast mysterious background which envelops everything 
human, which was when man was not, and will continue to 
be when he is no more. 

3. Now if we ignore Spencer's agnostic implications, it is 
not impossible to give to his doctrine of relativity an in- 
terpretation which relieves it of som.e of its more obvious diffi- 
culties. There is a well-defined and quite proper sense of 
knowledge — "knowledge about," to use a later terminology, as 
opposed to "acquaintance with" — which expressly limits itself 
to acts of discrimination from, and comparison with, other 
things. In this sense I can know redness, for example, as 
certainly I can describe it, only in so far as it is recognized 
as standing in specific relationships to other colors, or to 
nervous changes, or what not. It is true that in another mean- 
ing I am plainly able to give my attention to qualitative redness 
as such; and if there were not direct acquaintance here with 
some elementary sort of fact not dependent cognitively for 
its nature on relations, there would be no starting point for 
the discovery of relational connections. But it may be agreed 



Herbert Spencer 141 

that such knowledge is not yet "scientific." Limiting the term 
to the discriminating faculty alone, knowledge then is relative 
in the quite simple sense, not that it is produced by a relation 
between a subject and an object, but that its content is made 
up of the perception of relationships. 

Even if we were to stop here, there is nothing to make it 
necessary to suppose that we are driven to agnosticism. 
Granted that the content of knowledge consists of relations, 
there is still the chance that these relations may actually 
characterize the objective universe, so that in knowing them 
we in so far know reality truly. The only thing against this 
is the prejudice that real discriminations cannot enter into 
true being, which is, instead, a blank and featureless unity — a 
prejudice which as a matter of fact Spencer shares with Hamil- 
ton. But it has no particular affinity with his own more 
scientific interests. And in spite of his disclaimer, it would 
seem that he really must suppose that the relations which 
our thought perceives hold good to an extent of reality also; 
if we take literally the claim that while force actually exists it 
in no respect resembles what the human mind means by force, 
or that force really persists unchanged in quantity although 
"quantity" has no place in real existence, or that relations in 
our experience correspond to relations in the real world in 
spite of the fact that nothing we know as relations is to be 
found there, it can only be at the expense of leaving our words 
without meaning. 

And what Spencer chiefly has in mind when he asserts, 
as against Hamilton and Mansel, that the absolute is a positive 
conception and not a mere negation of thought, has no need 
to be inconsistent with this, if only Spencer would allow that, 
to be real, a thing does not have to be stripped of all definite 
character. The simplest interpretation of this absolute reality 
of which we have an obscure consciousness, but no idea, is to 
think of it as constituting that background of existence-stuff 
on which specific determinations of nature or character are 



142 English and American Philosophy 

written. The pure logical "nature" of things, that is, it is 
impossible should stand alone; there is in experience an "ever- 
present sense of real existence," which cannot indeed be 
"thought," since we are now abstracting from all the distinc- 
tions and qualifying adjectives which thinking applies to it, 
but which can nevertheless be pointed to, wordlessly, as that 
which is common to all thoughts or experiences alike to make It 
possible that the qualifications should be there. "Our notion 
of the Limited is composed firstly of a consciousness of some 
kind of being, and secondly a consciousness of the limits under 
which it is known. In the antithetical notion of the Unlimited 
the consciousness of limits is abolished, but not the conscious- 
ness of some kind of being." Now the word "limit" might 
readily suggest — and Spencer sometimes utilizes such a mean- 
ing for his argument — a sort of boundary line between ex- 
istence present in consciousness and reality not so present, a 
knowledge of this boundary implying therefore some knowl- 
edge also of a surrounding territory. This interpretation how- 
ever has nothing in common with the first and simpler one; 
here the limit is, rather, the particular "form" under which 
existence appears, and the absolute is the "raw material" 
worked up into these forms, the undifferentiated substance of 
consciousness, the sense of reality dissociated from the special 
shapes which it assumes in "thought," the indefinite conscious- 
ness of something constant under all modes of being and apart 
from its appearances.^ 

4. Now the claim that thought implies existence in some 
sense that does not reduce existence to a mere conceptual 
definition, that Being is not simply one idea among others — a 
particularly abstract idea, — but a background of reality-stuff 
in which ideal characters and relations focus, is one that is 
deserving of more attention than modern philosophers have 
usually bestowed upon it. It however falls short in two ways 
of Spencer's special metaphysical needs. Such an absolute, 

^ First Principles, pp. 89, £f. (4th Ed., N. Y., 1891). 



Herbert Spencer 143 

as there has already been occasion to remark, is "unknowable" 
only on the assumption that we can separate the forms that 
being takes from its raw material or stuff, and that this last 
alone truly is, though without being anything in particular; 
and taken as it stands it is at least equally conceivable that 
nothing can exist without a specific nature, which, therefore, 
truly characterizes it. But even apart from this, an analysis 
of consciousness into form and matter will in any case fail to 
cariy us beyond the conscious experience itself; whereas for 
Spencer the Absolute connotes primarily a field of existence 
corresponding to the ordinary notion of an independent phys- 
ical world on which the conscious life is causally dependent. 
And the claim that thought, or experience, implies a common 
stuff of reality capable of being felt as present in all its special 
embodiments — that it is "impossible these conditions or limits 
can be thought of apart from something to which they give 
the form" — is different from, and inconsistent with, the 
further claim that we are obliged to think of a Cause, positive 
though indefinite, which transcends the limit of our thought, 
or that our relative experience of force implies an absolute 
Force by which we are acted upon. So far, the indefinite 
"something" which the analysis has given us is simply the 
aspect of feeling-existence involved in every fact of conscious- 
ness. And in turning this into the recognition of an inde- 
pendent reality standing to our feelings in the relation of cause, 
Spencer is not only abandoning his first account of the way 
in which the absolute is "implied" by the relative, but he is 
explicitly retaining one relation at least as constitutive of the 
nature of the Absolute itself. Since his argument, however, 
leaves us only with bare Being stripped of all relationships 
whatever, this must apply equally to the relationship of cause, 
which we have no right accordingly to extrude from our 
conscious experience as its source. For Spencer's purpose, 
therefore, an altogether different line has to be taken when it 
becomes a question, not now of defining what he means by 



144 English and American Philosophy 

the absolute as distinct from the relative, but of justifying its 
existence as an independent Power. This is the argument from 
the Universal Postulate, issuing in the doctrine of Transfigured 
Realism. 

5. About the origin of the ultimate metaphysical beliefs 
on which, for Spencer, our possibilities of knowledge rest, his 
position is simple and straightforward. He holds consistently 
that they are implanted in us by the evolutionary process, 
which, though it begins with particular experiences, has made 
their results hereditary in the course of generations, so that 
now an organism is bom with certain truths or forms of 
thought ready to function at the start; it is thus that he con- 
siders he has reconciled the opposing schools of the empiricist 
and the intuitionalist. The logical justification of these truths, 
however, is more obscure. For the most part, Spencer rests 
it on a criterion which he calls the Universal Postulate. We 
accept the beliefs, namely, on the ground that their opposite 
is inconceivable; when we endeavor to set such an opposing 
proposition before the mind's eye, we discover that its terms 
cannot by any possibility be united in thought. 

To this criterion one obvious objection appears. In some at 
least of Spencer's illustrations it is very questionable whether 
as a matter of fact the inconceivability really exists. Take, 
for example, the dogma of the indestructibility of matter; some 
philosophers have thought they found no trouble in conceiv- 
ing that this may not be true, and the majority of mankind 
has actually disbelieved it in the past. To the modem scientist 
it may indeed appear incredible that matter should be de- 
stroyed; but there is another and easier interpretation of the 
source of this conviction. We may mean, namely, that the pos- 
sibility cannot be believed unless we are ready to give up the 
whole system of accepted knowledge; remove the assumption, 
and the fabric of belief which has been built around it by man's 
intellectual efforts will collapse. On this showing, however, the 
certainty lies not in any single tmth, but rather in the massive 



Herbert Spencer 145 

appeal of the concrete body of settled opinion, dependent on 
innumerable facts of experience with their multiform avenues of 
access to our being. And for such an interpretation, the other 
side of Spencer's doctrine also — the origin through evolution — 
becomes a real part of the situation, instead of a logical irrele- 
vance. If the conviction depends for its force upon the in- 
timacy of its connection with the total intellectual world struc- 
ture, then the recognition that the last word of systematized 
human belief — the doctrine of evolution — substantiates it, in 
that if evolution be true we should expect it to have brought 
about certain ways of thinking consistent — or they could not 
have survived — with the nature of reality, is an added ground 
of rational confidence in the postulate we have been using. 
And this second interpretation, according to which we assume 
a principle as true provisionally, and establish it by showing 
its congruity with all other beliefs, Spencer also occasionally 
adopts; though if taken seriously it would change the whole 
complexion of his doctrine of the Universal Postulate. 

The ambiguity here is explained in part by the fact that 
there are certainties of two different sorts which Spencer lumps 
together. I perceive, for example, that I have at a given mo- 
ment a particular kind of feeling, or that the lines which I 
envisage together are imequal ; so long as the truth depends on 
the positive nature of such a directly apprehended fact or 
relation, it is intelligible to say that I can convince myself of 
the "certainty" which is a psychological accompaniment of the 
truth — though not the truth itself — by attempting to com- 
bine it with its opposite, and failing in the attempt. I fail 
because when I am intuiting something real and immediately 
present, I cannot possibly assent to what denies it. But there 
are other beliefs, about which I may in a practical way be 
almost as certain, which are not of this sort, because the con- 
nection of ideas which the denial involves are not contradic- 
tories. Thus if I experience a sequence of events a and b, I 
should contradict myself if I held that it was not this sequence. 



146 English and American Philosophy 

but something different; but there would be no contradiction 
were I to suppose that on another occasion a might be fol- 
lowed by c instead, even though everything else were constant. 
And yet I am confident that this will not be so, and that imi- 
formity in nature can be relied on. 

6. Meanwhile it is to beliefs of this second sort that the 
Universal Postulate in Spencer's hands is chiefly intended to 
apply, and in particular to the ones with which we are here 
specially concerned — the belief in the persistence of Force 
which is to be the key for unlocking the mysteries of the evolu- 
tionary process, and the realistic belief in an existence inde- 
pendent of our conscious life. Spencer is creditably explicit in 
maintaining, against the idealistic disposition to evade the 
issue, the real existence of Being more ultimate than anything 
that can be identified as present in our conscious states. It is 
true he does not always quite live up to this; the endeavor, 
particularly in the First Principles, to state the distinction be- 
tween subject and object as a difference between faint and 
vivid states of consciousness, comes very close to subjectivism. 
But his actual use of the distinction, especially in the Psychol- 
ogy, gives it a definitely realistic turn; sensations, or vivid 
states, instead of being identified with the objective world, are 
recognized as, equally with ideas, belonging to the subject, 
their closer connection with the notion of external existence 
meaning only that they are more directly an expression of 
the ultimate Force constituting the reality back of physical 
nature. It is this reference to an unknown Power which now 
plays the leading part in the definition of the "object" — a 
Power beyond consciousness on which our sensations depend, 
and which we are led to think of "symbolically" in terms of 
the experience of force that attends the exercise of our own 
activity.^ 

When we turn to details, however, a number of doubtful 
issues are raised. That there is something which stands in 

*Ihid., pp. IS4 ff.; Psychology, Vol. II, Pt. VII, Chaps. 18-19. 



Herbert Spencer 147 

relation to our human energies, and which is able to initiate 
changes in us, is indeed a very persistent and universal human 
belief; but its connection with the Universal Postulate is less 
easy to make out. Spencer's argument implies the existence 
of an indissoluble cohesion between sensations and an in- 
definite consciousness that stands for a mode of being beyond 
consciousness; but the ground for this necessity is far from 
clear. In the first place, Spencer leaves his notion of this 
Absolute — when we rule out the former definition, which is 
irrelevant to an absolute "cause" — entirely without any con- 
tent with which an association could be set up; and even if 
we were to grant that it has a content, its connection with 
sensation would still lack that inevitability which the Postulate 
demands. Theoretically it is quite possible to think sensation 
apart from an external source, as is evidenced by the popu- 
larity of an idealistic hypothesis among philosophers as log- 
ically competent as Spencer himself. Other difficulties suggest 
themselves when we try to construe intelligibly the relation of 
the conscious fact, alike to the Power of which it is a mani- 
festation, and to the bodily structure with which it is corre- 
lated. At one time Spencer was disposed to think of mind and 
nervous process as both in the same scientific sense manifesta- 
tions of energy, and capable, like heat and motion, of being 
transformed one into the other. On reflection he came to see 
the lack of evidence for this, or even of any precise scientific 
meaning; though he continues in some vague and undefined 
sense to call them appearances of the same unknown Power. 
While however a physical fact may in an intelligible sense be 
reduced to a "phenomenon," if there is presupposed a conscious 
mind to v/hich it can appear, the term does not fit so readily 
the conscious fact itself. A sensation, if it is anything dis- 
tinctive at all, is for the moment at least real just as it stands, 
whatever more in the way of reality there may be. Spencer 
may think that he had evaded the difficulty by his definition 
of the real as "that which persists." But this is a definition of 



148 English and American Philosophy 

permanent existence, not of existence as such; and it does not 
preclude the possibility that transitory being may also be real 
so long as it lasts, and not mere illusory appearance. And if 
we once recognize that sensation can be called appearance only 
at best in the sense that it is partial and transitory, and not 
that it is unreal, it ceases to stand on the same level with mat- 
ter; and to speak of the two as different aspects of the unknown 
reality, or of consciousness as the opposite "side" of matter, 
is to fall back on a metaphor to which no distinct idea cor- 
responds. Indeed if we are to take seriously the assertion that 
phenomenal matter, as a "vivid" state of consciousness, is still 
a state of the ego, there is no double aspect even, but only a 
single manifestation of reality in the form of consciousness, 
if this be a "manifestation" at all. 

7. So far the notion of evolution has played no conspicu- 
ous part in Spencer's metaphysics, except as indirectly it has 
supplied a way of reconciling the experience philosophy with 
intuitionalism; and even this is a doctrine whose metaphysical 
importance it would be easy to exaggerate. In so far as an 
inherited tendency takes the form of a disposition to repeat, or 
to expect the repetition of, a sequence in experience, the ex- 
planation is plausible; but there are other cases where its ap- 
plication is more obscure. Thus when a mathematician dis- 
covers a novel and necessary truth in his science, there is no 
obvious way of deriving his certainty from his ancestors, unless 
they were better mathematicians than we have been accus- 
tomed to believe. In any case, however, the epistemological 
value of the sort of belief that Spencer wants to justify lies 
not in its natural history, but in its present force and com- 
pulsion. We do not believe it because we know that it has 
been brought about by natural selection, though this when 
recognized may add to its prestige; we should never have been 
put in the way of constructing a theory of its evolutionary his- 
tory had we not already accepted it and trusted it. 



Herbert Spencer 149 

The real interest of Spencer's system for all except a hand- 
ful of readers only begins when he turns from his theory of 
the Absolute to a concrete survey of the world of changing phe- 
nomena, and puts into actual operation the method of scientific 
generalization which he professes to identify with the possi- 
bility of valid thinking. It is already apparent that he is far 
from living up to this method in his more metaphysical moods. 
Even his theory of evolution is in two important ways a cre- 
ation of metaphysics rather than of science; not only does the 
concrete knowledge which it presupposes imply original pos- 
tulates that are not scientific matters of fact, but the deduc- 
tive justification which Spencer tries to give his evolutionary 
formula precedes logically, rather than is derived from, the 
formula itself. This a priori standpoint it is difficult at times 
to disentangle from his treatment of questions of detail, even 
when he supposes himself to be on the safe ground of science; 
and it is responsible for some of the more unconvincing aspects 
of his philosophy. But primarily evolution is for him the out- 
come of an inductive inquiry; and as such its evidence is largely 
independent of his theory of relativity, and of the unknowable. 

With Lamarckianism Spencer had come in contact through 
reading a book intended to controvert it; but his sympathy 
remained rather with the view he found criticized. The rea- 
son was not that he had any special competency to solve the 
biological problem, or that he was able to meet the objections 
which biologists generally had felt to lie in the way of La- 
marck's theory; with his usual preference for reaching large 
conclusions first, and then backing them up by evidence, it 
became clear to him that species must have been evolved, be- 
cause the only other alternative was the inadmissible one of 
special creation. And now with the idea once implanted in his 
mind, he was not content to limit it to biology; instinctively 
he began to universalize it. The task of finding a formula to 
express the new insight proved a laborious one; but at last 



150 English and American Philosophy 

the famous Spencerian definition of evolution was evolved, 
and the remainder of his life was devoted to its exploitation in 
the various fields of human knowledge. 

8. There is a side from which this definition is bound to 
appear pretentious as a claim to stand for a final philosophy. 
To suppose that the universe has been accounted for when you 
have said that things are all the time growing more complex 
and more unified is to have a limited notion of the philosopher's 
task. The recognition of development is clearly compatible 
with a great variety of opposing philosophies. This is not to 
deny the value of Spencer's work. While development does 
not settle the problems of philosophy, it does often change 
their face ; and no question perhaps can be settled finally with- 
out reference to it. Spencer was largely influential in making 
the idea a power in modern thought. Had it not been for the 
reinforcement that came from Darwin's application of the 
idea to a particular scientific problem, it is not certain how far 
he would have succeeded. But he was lucky in becoming 
possessed of the conception just at the moment when forces 
were preparing in the intellectual world for its favorable re- 
ception. And the impression he was able to make was vastly 
increased by the really remarkable fertility which he showed 
in applying it to problems of concrete interest. No man of 
his generation, or perhaps of his century, started a greater 
number of fruitful scientific theories in the most varied fields. 
Most of these theories would now be recognized as at best 
very partial. Spencer was much too disposed to be satisfied 
with logically simple explanations, more in accord wiih the 
deductive demands of his system than with the complexity of 
the facts. But his suggestions had the merit of openmg up 
inquiry along many lines that have led to permanent and 
valuable results. 

9. Apart from deficiencies in its application, there are to 
be noted also certain debatable characteristics in the concept 
of evolution itself as Spencer understands it. One comment 



Herbert Spencer 151 

which it calls for at the start has to do with the whole ideal of 
method which it implies. There are obvious limitations to an 
explanation that takes the form of abstract generalization. In 
fact this is not explanation at all, in the sense in which Dar- 
win's theory of natural selection is an explanation; and if we 
are tempted to take it as such, it suggests almost irresistibly 
an emphasis which is by no means self-evidently true, and 
which, if it is once assumed without clear justification from 
the facts, will inevitably lead us astray on matters of im- 
portance. A law, as Spencer thinks of it, is obtained by drop- 
ping out all differences as unessential, and retaining only the 
common elements. But now if we regard this also as an ac- 
count of how things actually came about, the problem arises 
of getting the differences we have ignored back into the world 
again. And if all we have to work with is an exceedingly 
simplified physical situation such as science reveals to us when 
we trace the universe back in time as far as we can go, and an 
exceedingly abstract formula of the process of succeeding 
change, we are led naturally to the conclusion that the later 
stages are reducible in their essential elements to the earlier. 
Instead of setting out to interpret reality, as is at least con- 
ceivably the proper way, by examining the outcome, and de- 
fining reality as the sort of affair that is capable of issuing in 
these results, we look rather to the beginning, and argue that 
if what we find there seems to be too simple to account for 
later facts, the appearance of novelty must be an illusion. 

It is this latter attitude which Spencer himself adopts. His 
main intellectual interest lies in reducing the new to the old, 
and in explaining apparent advance in terms of what some- 
how has been there all the time. But if this be taken strictly, 
it empties the term evolution of the distinctive meaning which 
it conveys to the popular imagination, and it becomes, as 
Spencer's definition suggests, no more than a constant re- 
shuffling of unchanging elements. These may attain to more 
complex and intricate groupings ; but a difference in the group- 



152 English and American Philosophy 

ing of elements is nevertheless the whole story. There is no 
genuine element of novelty anywhere injected; no surprises can 
ever be sprung on the world. This tendency to minimize the 
importance of differences is one, and perhaps the main oc- 
casion, why the results of naturalism seem so often to be hos- 
tile to the spiritual life. The human interest is otherwise; if 
science wants to find the beginnings of conscience, say, in 
the brutes, morality is chieily concerned for just those later 
refinements that distinguish brutes from men. So in the so- 
ciological field, this predilection shows in Spencer's constant 
minimizing of man as an active agent, in his resort to the 
environment and its eternal laws — man's own nature is of 
course one of the products of the past working of these laws 
— to account for human changes, and in his reluctance to allow 
us to call upon personal initiative and ingenuity to shape the 
world into courses unpredictable in terms simply of the past. 
Everything in conduct is to be explained by "incident forces" 
that rain in upon us from the surroundings, and gradually 
shape the organism into harmony with themselves; and what- 
soever is more than this cometh of evil. 

The difficulties which such an evolutionary ideal has to meet 
were never strongly enough felt by Spencer to impair the con- 
fidence he reposed in his formula, or to lead him to go to very 
much trouble to obviate them; but it is clear that difficulties 
exist. We find it hardest to avoid admitting differences of 
quality, as well as of complexity, in the realm of conscious phe- 
nomena. To say nothing of such facts as morality, and art, 
and certain aspects of the life of reason, where our natural 
tendency is to think that we discover genuine new qualities 
of experience, the mere existence of sensations puts a strain 
upon the attempt to reduce all change to the redistribution of 
matter and motion. Sensational qualities, like redness and 
sweetness and painfulness, have all the marks of being novel- 
ties incapable of being stated in terms of what precedes their ap- 
pearance in human feeling. And here for once Spencer him- 



Herbert Spencer 153 

self tacitly admits a break in the continuity of the evolutionary 
process; he allows, and even asserts, that the conscious fact 
cannot by any possibility be reduced to matter. But his 
emphasis on this is clearly due to his metaphysical, rather than 
to his evolutionary interest; and when he turns to the his- 
torical problem of the origin of consciousness, the whole effort 
is to minimize the difference. Consciousness, in Spencer's 
analysis, is more and more refined, more and more simplified, 
till it reaches the attenuated form of a momentary psychical 
"shock." ^ Within the conscious realm therefore, at any rate, 
qualitative differences can all be explained away; the seemingly 
ultimate distinctions between red and green, sound and taste, 
sensation and relation, are illusory, to be accounted for by 
the greater or less complexity of the combinations into which 
these simple units enter. It is true that one thing still re- 
mains to trouble the unity of our system — the psychic shock 
itself. But since this is near enough like a physical shock 
to go by the same name, Spencer seems to think that it is 
not necessary to make a fuss about it; there is such a slight 
difference between a little difference and no difference at all, 
that apparently we can afford to overlook quibbles about the 
law of contradiction. Indeed were it not for his disclaimer, 
the reader would certainly get the impression at times — in 
the chapter on the Nature of Intelligence in particular — that 
the difference has entirely disappeared, and that we are being 
shown how psychical changes ''merge into those which we dis- 
tinguish as physical," and arise from them by a process of 
gradual differentiation. 

10. Any attempt to cover the entire ground of Spencer's 
evolutionary philosophy would of necessity have to take the 
form of a mere catalog; it will be enough to pick out certain 
of its more outstanding features, especially such as emphasize 
the speculative demands of his system rather than the mere 
leading of facts. On the whole, as has been implied, Spencer 

^Psychology, Vol. I, Pt. II, Chap. i. 



154 English and American Philosophy 

is more vulnerable as a deductive than as an empirical philoso- 
pher. The evolutionary formula itself, it is safe to say, would 
have won very little acceptance had its evidence rested on 
Spencer's derivation of it as a necessity of thought; indeed 
it is a rather amazing example of speculative self-confidence, 
even among philosophers, that anyone should have been able 
to convince himself that the whole necessary course of cosmic 
development is predictable from, the bare proposition that 
energy persists. So also the more directly speculative aspects 
within the process are derived from its general principles, the 
safer one usually is in viewing them with some suspicion. 
And this is notably true of the application of the idea of evolu- 
tion to the life of man, and to ethical and social values. 

II. Spencer's ethics is, in the large, an attempt to impart to 
Utilitarian hedonism a scientific and deductive character, and 
to rescue it from mere empiricism. His method of doing this 
involves a double meaning of the term "good." From the 
standpoint of objective science, to begin with, a thing is good 
when it serves a required end. Now the end, in biological 
terms, of the human organism is self-preservation, or equilib- 
rium, or adjustment to the conditions of the environment. 
We have, accordingly, a biological test of good conduct which 
is independent of the vagaries of individual judgment, and is 
capable of receiving a precise scientific statement. 

It is this first conception of the good which furnishes the 
guiding clue to what is most characteristic in Spencer's ethical 
doctrine; and it suggests several queries. It is worth while 
noticing, to begin with, a certain assumption which it involves 
in Spencer's hands — one so congenial to his temperament that 
he overlooks the fact that it is an assumption. Natural laws 
commonly represent for Spencer not only facts to be recog- 
nized, but ideals which have a moral claim upon us; as one of 
his friends once remarked, "The laws of nature are to him 
what revealed religion is to us." To attempt to interfere with 
them is, therefore, not only foolish and meddlesome; Spencer 



Herbert Spencer 155 

often speaks in a tone to give the impression that it is impious 
as well. It is necessary to insist that such an attitude needs 
further justification. A natural law is not as such a "value"; 
to recognize that it is true is one thing, to approve it quite an- 
other. Here for example is the fundamental law of natural 
selection itself, and the survival of the fittest; is the fact that 
evolution has been dependent on such a law a sufficient reason 
why we should, from the standpoint of our present conduct, 
abase ourselves before it, and call it good? One would 
scarcely have expected so thoroughgoing a non-conformist as 
Spencer to have taken toward the status quo in nature the atti- 
tude of humble subservience which he was so earnest in re- 
pudiating toward earthly and heavenly powers. To be sure 
it is a deduction from his principles that, since we have been 
fashioned into what we are by natural laws, there must have 
been developed in us an approval-feeling to correspond; but 
this is only one case of many in which Spencer allows his faith 
in theory to run ahead of the facts. The recognition of a law 
of nature may leave us quite unmoved; we may even think of 
it — and this with many people is what happens in the case of 
natural selection — with strong feelings of dislike. And since 
a sense of duty depends upon what we actually find to be the 
nature of our approving judgments, rather than on what a 
theoretical philosophy tells us that we ought to expect to find, 
it is important for ethics that we should be able to give 
some further justification for the claim of biological adjust- 
ment to be accepted, not only as an end, but as the one de- 
sirable end; and this introduces a new element of "value" in 
the situation. 

12. Tacitly Spencer recognizes this demand in his alter- 
native definition. Grant that we can describe life in terms 
of adjustment to environment, and it may still reasonably be 
asked, he perceives, whether life, even a life perfectly adjusted, 
is really good. And the answer which he accepts is the tradi- 
tional answer of hedonism. Life is good only in so far as it 



156 English and American Philosophy 

involves a surplusage of pleasure over pain. It does not fol- 
low however that we are simply back again in empirical Utili- 
tarianism. The feeling of pleasure is indeed the only good; 
but this feeling we also know from science is an accompaniment 
of organic equilibrium. And while, to be sure, in the absence 
of a perfect adjustment, there is at present only a rough 
identity between the feeling and the biological tests, the partial 
inconsistency is removed when we take into account that 
growing approximation toward equilibrium which evolution 
presupposes. Just as our present feelings are accounted for 
by the utility of actions to the organism in the past, so new 
adjustments will gradually grow habitual, and therefore pleas- 
urable, until in the end we shall have the evolutionary goal, 
and the sense of subjective satisfaction, meeting in a state of 
affairs where, since man is now in complete harmony with his 
environment, he will instinctively do the right thing both for 
himself and for others, and will live happily ever after. And 
this knowledge of the ultimate goal gives us, accordingly, an 
objective standard by which the deficiencies of present feeling 
can be tested and corrected. 

It follows that for Spencer a scientific ethics can apply 
only to perfect and final man, and not, in any full sense, to 
human beings as they exist today. Our actual morality is a 
compromise which has after all to be got at more or less by 
rule of thumb. We have to do many things which involve a 
certain amount of pain, and which therefore are only rela- 
tively right, not absolutely so; the precepts of absolute moral- 
ity must wait until our constitution has become by the further 
process of evolution so completely harmonized with its sur- 
roundings, that virtue comes by nature and without effort. A 
connected consequence is that duty is only a passing phase in 
the ethical life, due to our imperfection as moral beings. 
Duty in its origin is an outcome of the need for putting con- 
straint upon men's inclinations, owing to the fact that they 
are not as yet adequately socialized. This constraint, effected 



Herbert Spencer 157 

originally through the external agencies of law and public 
opinion and religion — the visible ruler, the invisible ruler, 
and society at large, — becomes in course of time a second nature 
which loses consciousness of its source, and remains only as 
a vague sense of authority laid upon us. As man's reason 
develops, the need for such outside pressure is gradually sup- 
planted by a recognition of the value of the socially constrained 
act in terms of its own more intrinsic consequences, though by 
association the vague sense of authority continues for a time 
to attach to this recognition also ; but when at last we are fully 
adjusted to social conditions it will disappear, leaving only 
the spontaneous pleasure of doing what we like to do. 

13. Perhaps the question that gets closest to the more dis- 
tinctive features of Spencer's ethical theory concerns itself 
with the underlying supposition that it is possible for man 
to get outside the actual present fashion in which his nature 
judges things in the way of likes and dislikes, and to subject 
these to the dictates of a scientific h^-pothesis about the world, 
and the course of its future changes. What is the justification 
for identifying morality with the good of a hj^othetical being 
not yet in existence, and differing widely from ourselves? We 
at least may premise that this is not the way we ordinarily 
think of moral problems. In practice we are concerned with 
actions here and now, not with those of our remote descendents. 
It is our own good and the good of our fellows that we are 
aiming at; and if the act is the best possible act under the cir- 
cumstances, it is the right act, absolutely and not relatively, 
though it may not involve all the pleasurable consequences 
that would accrue in a perfect world. To deal with this last 
consideration we have to shift the issue; we now are taking 
as the problem of ethics, not the everyday business of living, 
but the rather grandiose task of carrying on the process of 
cosmic evolution, and seeing so far as lies in us that it does not 
go astray. Indeed on Spencer's showing the question, What 
is it my duty to do? apparently is crowded out altogether in 



158 English and American Philosophy 

a scientific ethics. / cannot answer it on principle, because 
ethical principles apply only under conditions different from 
my own; and my perfect descendents cannot answer it, be- 
cause they will never have any occasion to raise it, the matter 
being settled for them by their natural constitution. 

To this it might perhaps be replied that we are not left with- 
out an answer after all; our very formula supplies one. What 
could be a greater and more inspiring ideal of ethical conduct 
than to think of it, not as dealing with matters of casuistic de- 
tail, but as a cooperation with the forces of evolution, a grand 
campaign to remake human nature? But it is just the char- 
acter of this ideal that gives point to the suspicions which it 
will arouse in minds adjusted to a less ambitious program. 
There is, to begin with, a reasonable doubt about our intel- 
lectual capacity to turn the very abstract generalizations of 
evolutionary science into a source of explanation sufficiently 
precise to guide us in the work of furthering the world's prog- 
ress toward a creature different from ourselves, and living 
under different conditions. A few very general things can 
of course be said — most of which, however, everyone knew per- 
fectly well before the philosophy of evolution was invented — 
about what is required if life is to be preserved at all, and the 
race to go on. But what constitutes fulness and satisfactori- 
ness of life, as distinct from length of days, we can only tell 
if we know the exact nature of the being who is to be satis- 
fied; and it is difficult to see how anything but an empirical 
tr5dng out of the possibilities of living can give us this. Con- 
tinuance is compatible with innumerable sorts of natures, from 
the amoeba up; and mere complexity, mere addition to the 
complications and the busyness of our lives, is no self-evident 
definition of an ethical ideal. It is the kinds of activity that 
concern us as creatures aiming at moral satisfaction, not their 
number simply; and the more we emphasize complexity, the 
more insistent becomes the need of some principle for choos- 
ing between the alternatives. 



Herbert Spencer 159 

But even if it were possible to anticipate much more exactly 
than we have any reason to expect to do the specific course 
of future evolution, another difficulty remains; the motive to 
its attainment must still be supplied. Why should a man 
give up the ends that afford him satisfaction now, because he 
is convinced that to some other being in the future they will 
not appeal? Changes in human nature may be bound to 
happen, but that is no reason why they should concern us 
who are not to live to see them; we might as well govern our 
lives in view of the ultimate dissolution of the solar system. 
It may amuse the scientist to prophesy these coming changes 
in the cosmos; but this, especially in view of the very real 
chance that the scientist may prove mistaken, has no relevancy 
to ethics. Of course it may be that one thing that appeals 
to men, or to some of them, is the "contemplation from the 
heights of thought of that far-off life of the race never to be 
enjoyed by them, but only by a remote posterity." But this 
is a motive to whose strength it would be unsafe to trust in- 
terests of any very vital importance, even if the practical de- 
sirability of this were clearer than it seems to be. Certainly 
the classes on whom the evils of the time bear hardest are 
not likely to take kindly to Spencer's suggestion that they ought 
to be willing to wait for evolution to bring relief to their pos- 
terity. And in any case the thing even here that moves us is 
not the scientific perception of a future event, but the empirical 
fact that we do have here and now this particular interest 
among others. 

One may conjecture, then, that Spencer's notion of the ethical 
goal is really less dependent on pure scientific deduction than 
he thinks; in proposing it to us as an ideal, it is, probably, the 
consonancy of the proposal with his own sense of ethical fitness 
which convinces him that the connection with his formula is a 
logical and necessary one, rather than logic which determines 
what he shall approve. And now this suggests the question to 
what extent Spencer's notion of the good life is really such as 



i6o English and American Philosophy 

arouses our spontaneous enthusiasm and approval. And cer- 
tainly an ideal from which all self-sacrifice and all moral effort 
must needs be eliminated, and where impulse can be trusted 
always to go right mechanically, will not be accepted by every- 
one as of the highest order. There is something that grates a 
little on our sensibilities when we are told that human love, 
for example, is only perfect, only in the full sense good and 
right, when altruism has become so instinctive as to lead to 
what is best for others without the least call upon oiu- capacity 
for giving up any pleasure of our own. Nor will a world which 
has stopped growing, and in which life is a continuous round 
of unchanging habit perfectly adjusted to its surroundings — 
a curious ideal for an evolutionist, — seem very amusing to 
those who happen to feel that an element of struggle and ad- 
venture, and the presence of possibilities of development still 
waiting to be tapped, are involved in a genuinely satisfying 
experience. 

14. Meanwhile one aspect of Spencer's theory ought to 
be made more explicit, since it plays so large a part in his so- 
ciology. Since ethical advance lies not in a more adequate 
realization of our present constitution, but in a change of 
human nature, it can, Spencer holds, only be brought about 
by the continuance in future generations of the same process 
of organic modification, particularly the modification of the 
feelings, which has resulted in the development of the species 
up to date. This is the theoretical justification of that atti- 
tude of passive obedience to nature to which Spencer is com- 
mitted, and which seems in the end the only real suggestion 
of practical guidance which his theory supplies. The chief 
duty of man is to stand aside and keep his hands off the cosmic 
machinery; trust to evolution, and forbear doing anything to 
interfere with those forces which, by a law of inevitable neces- 
sity, are gradually bringing about a harmonious adjustment 
of man's constitution to the world in which he lives. In the 
realm of politics this is the doctrine of laissez-faire which 



Herbert Spencer i6i 

strikes the dominant note of Spencer's sociological teachings, 
— the doctrine that the organized action of the state should 
confine itself strictly to the negative task of ensuring liberty 
to the individual to do as he pleases so long as he does not 
interfere with a similar liberty in other men, and should re- 
frain from more positive attempts to engineer the cause of 
human welfare. 

There are several ways in which Spencer tries to attach this 
practical conclusion to his evolutionary premises. Thus it is 
the teaching of the law of evolution that functions become 
more and more specialized in special organs. The government 
is such an organ, whose one distinctive work is to prevent mu- 
tual aggression. By the general law of things it ought to con- 
fine itself therefore to its proper task; if it gets beyond these 
bounds, and tries to accomplish that for which other machinery 
exists, it not only will bungle this, but it will lose so much 
energy also for the proper performance of its own peculiar task. 
The most fundamental reason, however, is to be found in 
Spencer's understanding of the method of progress. The es- 
sence of justice is that every man should be free from ex- 
ternal interference; and why? In the last analysis, because 
otherwise men are enabled to escape the consequences of their 
acts, and so natural selection is hindered in its beneficent task. 
The chief reason why government interference proves always 
a calamity is, that it tends to even up the inequalities among 
men, relieving weakness and ignorance of the penalties that 
are their due, and preventing superior capacity from peopling 
the world with its better stock. For it is this that in the end 
is alone decisive. The one possibility of progress is through 
those changes in the human organism, brought about through 
"multitudinous generations," which bring it into greater har- 
mony with the conditions of life; and the road to this is the 
one that nature has always followed — the storing up of suc- 
cessful habit till it becomes hereditary, and the elimination of 
those members of the species that fail to qualify. 



1 62 English and American Philosophy 

This is perhaps the supreme example of the light-heartedness 
with which Spencer rests the most fateful issues on the infalli- 
bility of his logical deductions. There is no more difficult 
and complex problem waiting to be solved than that which 
concerns the desirable forms and limits of state activity; but 
for Spencer the question is a closed one, which only an extreme 
of intellectual perversity can prevent from being answered 
as he himself would answer it. It is true he adduces many prac- 
tical considerations to justify his attitude, some of them im- 
pressive, and all deserving to be weighed; but it is not these 
that clinch the matter to his own mind, or give him his dog- 
matic assurance. There are several things that might have sug- 
gested greater caution. One is that his reasoning everywhere 
involves a belief in the inheritance of acquired characters, a 
belief which had already become scientifically dubious. So 
too the application of the struggle for existence to the concep- 
tion of human and cultural progress is by no means a simple 
matter; it involves important points of difference from that form 
of natural selection that goes on in the brute world, and these 
differences Spencer's rough-and-ready identification mostly 
overlooks. But perhaps the objection easiest to set forth is 
that which our ethical prepossessions themselves supply. Spen- 
cer does not allow sentiment to keep him from drawing con- 
clusions which he is aware will not be altogether popular. 
"A sad population of imbeciles would our schemers fill the 
world with, could their plans last. Why, the whole effort of 
nature is to get rid of such — to clear the world of them, and 
make room for better. He on whom his own stupidity or vice 
or idleness entails loss of life must in the generalizations of 
philosophy be classed with the victims of weak viscera or mal- 
formed limbs. Beings thus imperfect are nature's failures, and 
are recalled by her when found to be such. Along with the 
rest they are put on trial. If they are sufficiently complete to 
live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are 
not sufficiently complete to live they die, and it is best they 



Herbert Spencer 163 

should die," Even if we could share Spencer's pious confi- 
dence that ''nature's" penalties are always just, and propor- 
tioned to the offence, the assumption that no potentialities 
exist in man which the hit-or-miss arrangements of natural 
circumstance may overlook, although a more artificial order- 
ing of affairs might have supplied the occasion for their de- 
velopment, would seem to call for reconsideration. 

Spencer himself would allow that it is asking too much that 
we forego entirely the claims of compassion; he qualifies by 
adding that he would not forbid assistance to the ignorant and 
the miserable so long as this is left to individual initiative. But 
if the point is that weakness should not be bolstered up and 
protected from its natural consequences, it is a little hard to 
see why this is any less calamitous because it is due to private 
rather than to public stupidity. Spencer has ways of soften- 
ing the difficulty. Charity has a use, for example, in bene- 
fiting the moral character of the giver; and in any case a man, 
if left to himself, can safely be counted on not to be charitable 
enough to offset his own advantages, and those of his offspring. 
The implication here is, however, that along with relief will 
go, or ought to go, a refusal to allow the needy to propagate 
their kind ; and Spencer has to confess that the chance of this 
is very slim in practice. The consequence is that as he sur- 
veys the disloyalty of man to nature, he is driven pretty nearly 
to despair; it would almost seem that the march of the cosmic 
process, whose necessity had been so triumphantly proven, is 
in danger after all of being turned aside by the folly of the 
human mind in refusing to see the truth of the Spencerian 
philosophy. 

15. One additional aspect of the Synthetic Philosophy re- 
mains to be mentioned — the treatment of religion. On the 
historical side, religious beliefs are of course, like other be- 
liefs, evolved; and in this connection belongs Spencer's well- 
known theory of the origin of religion in ancestor-worship, 
arising out of an earlier belief in ghosts or doubles which the 



164 English and American Philosophy 

phenomena of dreams, echoes, shadows, and the like, suggest 
to the savage mind. Historical religions, accordingly, are 
discredited at the start by an understanding of their source. 
And not only are historical beliefs demonstrably inadequate, 
but there is in the nature of the case a reason for holding that 
all such beliefs must fail, since it has been shown that, by the 
composition of our minds, we are necessarily shut out from 
a knowledge of ultimate existence. But now having thus 
got rid of every positive content in religious belief, Spencer 
is ready with a substitute. The irreducible minimum of all 
religion is the sense of the ultimate mystery of the universe; 
and not only does science fail to touch this, but it deepens 
it with every fresh advance. A feeling of awe, accordingly, in 
the presence of the Unknown and Unknowable, is the final 
form that religion is destined to take. 

;, It is no very arduous task to point out the emotional de- 
ficiencies of a religion of the Unknowable. But here once more 
it would perhaps be rash to suppose that Spencer really in- 
tends at bottom all that he seems to say. He enters a protest 
against the imputation that the unknowableness of reality is 
what for him forms the object of religion, rather than the posi- 
tive existence of which the proposition that we cannot know 
it holds; ^ and this is a distinction without a difference unless 
it stands for something like the religious commonplace that 
God, while known to possess the attributes that deserve our 
reverence, yet possesses them in a form and a degree beyond 
the power of the finite mind to grasp. There appears a slight 
presumption that Spencer would not have denied the right to 
give some measure of faith to a larger and less exact method 
of analogical reason, for the sake of coming to at least a con- 
jectural understanding of the world of reality beyond the hu- 
man, provided we find that to frame such a system of reason- 
able faith is necessary to our mental and spiritual health. It 
would seem from occasional utterances— John Fiske refers 
^ First PrinciUes, p. SoS. 



Herbert Spencer 165 

to definite statements made to him personally in conversation 
— that Spencer did not dogmatically exclude such tentative 
and hypothetical constructions. And one passage in particular, 
at the close of the Autobiography, gives some color to the sug- 
gestion. After saying that he had come in later life to look 
more calmly on current forms of religious belief, Spencer goes 
on: "Largely, if not chiefly, this change of feeling towards 
religious creeds and their sustaining institutions has resulted 
from a deepening conviction that the sphere occupied by them 
can never become an unfilled sphere, but that there must con- 
tinue to arise afresh the great questions concerning ourselves 
and surrounding things; and that, if not positive answers, then 
modes of consciousness standing in place of positive answers, 
must ever remain. . . . When we think of the myriads of 
years of the earth's past during which have arisen and passed 
away low forms of creatures great and small, which, murder- 
ing and being murdered, have gradually evolved, how shall 
we answer the question. To what end? Ascending to wider 
problems, in which way are we to interpret the lifelessness 
of the greater celestial masses — the giant planets and the Sun, 
in proportion to which the habitable planets are mere nothings? 
If we pass from these relatively near bodies to the thirty mil- 
lions of remote suns and solar systems, where shall we find 
a reason for all this apparently unconscious existence, infinite in 
amount compared with the existence which is conscious — a 
waste Universe as it seems? Then behind these mysteries lies 
the all-embracing mystery, — whence this universal transforma- 
tion which has gone on unceasingly throughout a past eternity, 
and will go on unceasingly throughout a future eternity? And 
along with this arises the paralyzing thought, What if of all 
that is thus incomprehensible to us there exists no compre- 
hension anywhere? . . . No wonder that men take refuge in 
authoritative dogma! Lastly come the insoluble questions con- 
cerning our own fate; the evidence seeming so strong that 
the relations of mind and nervous structure are such that cessa- 



1 66 English and American Philosophy 

tion of the one accompanies dissolution of the other, while 
simultaneously comes the thought, so strange and so difficult to 
realize, that with death there lapses both the consciousness of 
existence and the consciousness of having existed. Thus re- 
ligious creeds which in one way or other occupy the sphere 
that rational interpretation seeks to occupy and fails, and fails 
the more it seeks, I have come to regard with a sympathy based 
on community of need, feeling that dissent from them results 
from inability to aceept the solutions offered, joined with the 
wish that solutions could be found." 



§ 3. G. H. Lewes 

I, Spencer's is the only attempt at a really comprehensive 
philosophy which evolution, as a scientific doctrine, inspired; 
but the influence of the theory of evolution helped everywhere 
to stiffen that prevailing naturalistic temper among scientifically 
trained men, based on an ardent faith in the possibilities of 
scientific method and a distrust of theology and of metaphysics, 
which had already been an ingredient in Utilitarianism, and 
which was to have a brilliant career down to nearly the close 
of the century. Without the help extended by the spectacular 
successes of the physical sciences, it is scarcely probable that 
Utilitarian naturalism would have held its own for very long; 
in spite of its fascination for minds of a certain cast, it is too 
far removed from the popular fancy in religion and politics, 
and its metaphysical foundations are too insecure, to make 
it easy to imagine for it a continued triumph. The appear- 
ance of a powerful ally, however, gave the naturalistic spirit 
a new lease of life. Modem science is much too solid a fact 
to fear in the long run attacks from either theory or prejudice; 
and it was natural that its prestige should win a respectful 
hearing for supplementary doctrines also. When the man in 
the street hears it said repeatedly that "scientists" believe 



G. H. Lewes 167 

so and so, he can hardly fail in time to be impressed ; and even 
the controversialist finds it hard to overcome entirely his awe 
in the presence of the more rigorous and realistic methods 
of his scientific opponents. Meanwhile the interest of science 
in philosophical addenda was not quite the same in motive with 
that of the Utilitarians. Here and there a scientist of course 
will have a metaphysical bent as well ; but it is not likely that 
the widespread interest in philosophical problems in the second 
half of the century would have been in evidence had science 
been as free from outside interference as at the present day. It 
was because religion pretended to pronounce on matters in which 
the scientist was vitally concerned, that he thought it neces- 
sary to clear the ground with a metaphysical attack upon the 
current creed. The Utilitarian had also had the same desire 
to undermine religion, but his reason was a different one; it 
was a practical and social reason, the outcome of the belief 
that religious conservatism was on the side of the enemies of 
progress. 

2. A tj^Dical representative of the claims of scientific 
method, whose work shows clearly the influence of the new 
ideas in their transitional stage, is George Henry Lewes. Lewes 
was a competent amateur scientist, and an industrious and 
versatile man of letters. His first venture was his Biographical 
History of Philosophy, a very readable book which is not 
likely however to please the philosopher, since it proceeds on 
the assumption that books on philosophy have mostly been 
a waste of ink. In a later revision however, and in his more 
mature work entitled Problems of Life and Mind, this super- 
ciliousness has appreciably abated. The blame is now placed 
not on metaphysics itself, but on its mistaken method; and 
Lewes, assuming himself the role of metaphysician, sets out 
to show how philosophical problems can profitably be attacked. 

Lewes' program consists in the disentanglement from phi- 
losophy of all the elements that are "metempirical," and so 
essentially insoluble and meaningless, and the restatement of its 



1 68 English and American Philosophy 

problems in a form that can conceivably be answered in terms 
of experience. Thus the notion of a soul behind mental phe- 
nomena, of a substratum in which qualities inhere, of power 
as an effective agent, of law as that which is supposed to 
govern changes instead of undertaking simply to describe them 
— these are all metempirical, mere hypostasized verbal ab- 
stractions, and should be rigorously excluded from a scien- 
tific philosophy. Philosophy accordingly becomes a logic of 
the highest concepts or generahzations of science. Lewes' 
analysis of fundamental scientific notions, though its results 
have no striking novelty, is skilfully done, and there is noth- 
ing of necessity to prevent its being accepted in large meas- 
ure by philosophers of a different school. What really separates 
positivism from other philosophies is not this logic of science, 
but the further claim that science exhausts all the legitimate 
possibilities of knowledge; and here the issue becomes less 
straightforward. 

3. It is doubtful whether Lewes has, in spite of his read- 
ings in the history of philosophy, more than a vague under- 
standing of the "metaphysical" method which he is attacking; 
to him it has the popular sense of an appeal to some supposed 
special intellectual faculty or abstract form of thought, or, 
even worse, to final causes, as a competitor of scientific ex- 
planation. Now neither of these things is necessarily involved 
in the supposition that it may be possible to attain a knowledge 
of the nature of reality other than the tracing of experienced 
sequences. One can put the problem in a way to prejudge 
the issue — if such an inquiry is made to mean, that is, a 
hunt for some characterless entity, some underlying substratum, 
whose like never enters into experience. But to ask whether 
we may not perhaps have a right to think the nature of reality 
in terms such as experience itself supplies, is not an obvious 
absurdity. Take once more the simplest possible case. The law 
of the sequence of sensations is one thing, the nature of the 
sensation itself is another; and if sensation be a real part 



G. H. Lewes 169 

of the universe, as supposedly it is, in knowing it we have a 
knowledge which is not merely relative, or reducible to scientific 
laws of phenomena. The same ambiguity appears in Lewes' 
principle of relativity that appeared in Spencer. Our knowl- 
edge, he everywhere insists, is necessarily and forever only 
relative; what does this mean? That I cannot know aboM 
a thing, or describe it, except in terms of its relation to other 
things, is doubtless true; and if I choose to speak of knowing 
only in this sense, there can be no knowledge without relations. 
But now while all the information I have about red, other than 
its intrinsic redness, comes from acts of comparison, the red- 
ness itself does not depend on the comparison, but rather the 
comparison on it; and I plainly can have acquaintance with it 
in its own right. 

This need not mean that a single entity can exist by itself; 
the discovery of relations attaching to it shows that it somehow 
belongs to a related world. And if to know a thing "in itself" 
is made to mean — and this is how Lewes insists on taking it 
— that we know it as something that has no relations, that is, 
as it cannot exist, it is a simple matter for him to appear to 
make his point. But to uphold the thesis that all knowledge is 
relative, it is necessary to get rid not only of an unknown sub- 
stratum conceived as an unrelated existence, but of all knowl- 
edge content that has its own independent and non-relational 
character ; and this Lewes' argument, at least, quite fails to do. 
There seems no reason in the nature of knowledge, then, why it 
may not be possible to claim acquaintance with the actual tex- 
ture of the world, as well as with descriptive laws of change 
and sequence. This may lie outside the strictly scientific in- 
terest; the intrinsic qualitative nature of reality, if we could 
get at it, would very likely not help us to explain events. But 
the elimination of every other possible interest in favor of 
the scientific is what positivism must justify rather than as- 
sume. 

It is not necessary however to establish a rival philosophy 



I/O English and American Philosophy 

in order to throw doubt on Lewes' conception of philosophic 
method; it is sufficient to appeal from his theory to his prac- 
tice. Whatever his success in establishing the methods of sci- 
ence, it is certainly not these same methods that he uses in 
prosecuting the inquiry. If all knowledge is relative, we at 
least must make an exception of the truth that all knowledge 
is relative. It is the necessary intrusion of the knowledge 
problem into the situation which destroys the advantage that 
the positivist philosopher counts on through his supposed 
backing by science. And when we once enter seriously on 
this problem, we are boimd to discover sooner or later that 
we have passed from laws of sequence to questions of "nature" 
— have become, whether we wish it or not, ontologists. It is 
therefore by its treatment of the foundation concepts of psy- 
chology in their relation to the objectively known facts of the 
world, that the sufficiency of a scientific philosophy is chiefly 
tested. 

Lewes' discussion of psychology itself as an empirical sci- 
ence has undeniable merits. To the meagre sensational data 
of the Utilitarians he makes several important additions — 
intuition as the perception of relations, ancestral experience 
which supplies ready-made "forms of thought" or permanent 
ways of grouping the elements of experience, and the concep- 
tion of a "social medium" in addition to the physical. In 
particular, the relationship of the conscious life to the bio- 
logical organism is grasped by him with a precision not sur- 
passed by Spencer, and governs nearly every aspect of his 
treatment. But while the "organic" view throws undoubted 
light on the laws of psychological process, there is real danger 
that it may obscure the issue when we come to deal with the 
more ultimate problems concerned; and it is his proneness to 
avail himself of ambiguities here that makes it impossible to 
class Lewes as a really first-rate thinker. 

4. For philosophy, the primary question that needs an an- 
swer is, What do we mean by the "conscious" life, and how is- 



G. H. Lewes 171 

it connected with the physical body? Now the UtiUtarians, 
whatever their deficiencies, did know what they meant by the 
''psychological" fact; it is doubtful whether Lewes does, and 
at least it is very difficult for his readers to discover. There 
are two sets of utterances, in particular, the attempt to recon- 
cile which leads to a degree of confusion unusual even in 
philosophy. On the one hand is the idealistic claim that by 
the real is meant solely that which is given in feeling, all the 
distinctions recognized by thought being, not existent entities, 
but "aspects" within a feeling whole.^ And this applies there- 
fore to the crucial distinction between Self and not-Self; subject 
and object are not really separate, but are only logically dis- 
tinguishable. On the other hand this "relativity" is given 
a more scientific expression through the assumption that, for 
subject and object, we may substitute organism and environ- 
ment. When we put our thesis into this new terminology, it 
then appears that, with reference to the organism also, the 
object is not independent, but is only one aspect of a single 
fact; perception is not an e^ect, but an assimilation of the 
object by the organism, as nutrition is the assimilation of 
food.^ At the same time, when we call the objective world a 
phenomenal aspect, it is not to be supposed that it is a falsifica- 
tion of reality. In perception, reality is only revealed to 
each man as an appearance; but it is to each what it appears 
as, or is felt to be.^ 

5. Now the last contention, to take this as a starting point, 
has a clear enough meaning so long as we keep strictly within 
a physical universe of discourse, and debar psychology and 
epistemology. Once accept the scientific fact of a physical 
organism in interaction with the surrounding world, and, in 
terms of process, the "neural tremors" are reality in that par- 
ticular phase; they represent reality as it exists under the spe- 
cific conditions of interaction described. But in what sense 

^Problems of Life and Mind, ist Series, Vol. II, p. i6. 
^IbM., Vol. I, pp. 186, 189; Vol. II, p. 473. 
^Ibid., Vol. I, p. 192. 



172 English and American Philosophy 

then are organism and object merely inseparable "aspects" of 
this neural process, and not factors apart from whose existence 
out of combination it never would have come about? The fact 
cannot be at the same time both that experience is the product 
of subject and object, and that these last are only aspects oj 
experience; the two statements represent inconsistent ways 
of thinking, of which the first refers to the common-sense notion 
of interaction between organism and environment, and the lat- 
ter to a more or less dubious metaphysical reinterpretation. 
If we overlook the two cooperating factors, and identify this 
particular causal process in the universe with "experience," 
within whose borders all the content of knowledge resides, it 
is inconceivable that we should ever arrive at the knowledge 
that it is a result, and of the conditions on which it depends. 
If we are confined to experience, and expyerience is intra- 
organic or neural, what right have we to talk of an external 
world on which this process, and ultimately the organism itself, 
depends? How do we pass from the object as the other side 
of the subject, to the object as a "larger circle which includes" 
the subject? ^ Nevertheless all the scientific verisimilitude 
that Lewes' philosophy possesses depends on taking the factors 
as actual agents, and not as aspects simply. 

Lewes himself constantly recognizes this when he is speaking 
as a scientist; but he thinks to save his metaphysics by in- 
sisting that, although the physical stimulus has an existence 
out of relation to the organism, it still does not exist "in itself," 
but only in other relations.^ Verbally this may appear at least 
to save the doctrine of relativity, though not without raising 
further problems. The claim that an object is nothing but re- 
lations is a form of words whose possession of any real mean- 
ing is open to question ; does the statement that the independent 
object is "just the same objective factor in other relations" 
mean, for example, that it is the "relation to an organism" 

^Ibid., Vol. I, p. 19s; Vol. II, p. 23s. ^Ibid., Vol. II, p. 239. 



G. H. Lewes 173 

in other relations? But in any case, these new relations have 
no connection with an organism, and so do not constitute "ex- 
perience"; though science presupposes them nevertheless to 
be real, and even to be knowable. For if relations between ob- 
jects outside the body are not what they are known to be, 
then science is impossible; or at best the only thing in the 
universe it could know would be the neural process. Of course 
when they are known they do come into connection with the 
organism; and Lewes has a chance to say that thus they be- 
come experience. But this again shifts the point of view; as 
experience they are only new cases of neural tremors, and we 
are as far as ever from the larger world of objects and proc- 
esses of which the organism itself is only an infinitesimal part. 
That its power to produce effects in us is so much added knowl- 
edge of the object is of course true; but what Lewes started 
out to maintain was, that these relations to an organism, minus 
even the knowledge that they are effects, are the sole intelli- 
gible content of the word "real." 

6. And now there is one further point that still more com- 
plicates the situation. So long as we are thinking in physical 
terms, we can at least interpret what we mean when we talk 
about a neural fact that is set up by the interaction of organ- 
ism with environment, even though our right to postulate these 
last conceptions is obscure. But "experience" does not primarily 
suggest a "neural tremor." It means color-feeling, sound-feel- 
ing, pleasure and pain, emotion, logical process, and the like; 
and these have no resemblance to the physical organism and its 
activities. To accept a new kind of fact here would be how- 
ever to nullify all of Lewes' scientific demands; accordingly 
he meets the difficulty by still another interpretation of sub- 
ject and object as related "aspects." Instead of organism and 
environment being aspects of the unitary neural process, this 
entire process itself is now contrasted with a new definition of 
the "subject" as identified with immediate consciousness or 



174 English and American Philosophy 

feeling, and the separation overcome by calling the two the 
concave and convex sides of a single reality.^ The transition 
is eased by the word "sensibility." Sensibility, Lewes urges, 
is by everyone admitted to be a property of the physical organ- 
ism, — which, if by sensibility we mean the "reaction of a 
neuro-muscular mechanism," or a power of response in the 
nervous system leading to self-protection, is entirely true.- 
But we are still as far as ever from the psychical in the sense in 
which this stands for something admittedly not like a physical 
movement or group of movements; and the fact that the word 
sensibility may also be used in the quite different sense of 
feeling and sensation, is no ground for supposing that the gap 
has been bridged between the two orders of existence. And 
Lewes' efforts to expound his meaning do not remedy the mat- 
ter. His common habit is to regard the doubleness of aspect 
as due to the engagement of different sense organs. But this 
gives a precarious foundation for the claim that mental process 
is only another aspect of physical process. Both may be dif- 
ferent appearances of the same unknown reality beyond the 
organism, — provided we have first gained the right to speak 
of this reality at all; but if the physical is to mean only cer- 
tain optico-tactical sensations, it is no "other side" of feeling, 
but only one set of feelings among others within the psychical 
field.3 

§ 4. Thomas Huxley 

I. The attitude of scepticism toward all "metempirical" be- 
liefs which Lewes attempted to justify on the basis of sound 
scientific method, receives a simpler, and, partly for this reason, 
a much more striking expression in Thomas Huxley. The tem- 
peramental bias with which a naturalistic creed in modem times 
will usually be found associated, has in Huxley its perfect 

^ Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 112, iig; Vol. II, p. 4S9. 

^ Third Series, Vol. II, pp. 20, 38. 

'First Series, Vol. 11, pp. 482 ff. ; Second Series, p. 3.t;i. 



Thomas Huxley 175 

fruit. The one human virtue that for him overtops the rest, — 
and it is a virtue so rare, comparatively, that even an over- 
emphasis upon it may be excusable, — is intellectual honesty. 
"If you will accept the results of the experience of an old 
man who has had a very chequered existence," he writes to- 
ward the close of his life, "there is nothing of permanent value, 
— putting aside a few human affections, — nothing that satis- 
fies quiet reflection, except the sense of having worked, ac- 
cording to one's capacity and light, to make things clear, and 
to get rid of cant and shams of all sorts. This was the lesson 
I learned from Carlyle's book when I was a boy, and it has 
stuck by me all my life," Sentiment, emotion, feeling — these 
may be very well in their place; but their place is certainly 
not to interfere with cool, clear, straightforward thinking. 
"My beliefs positive and negative," he writes to Kingsley in 
reply to a note of sympathy on the death of his little son, 
"on all the matters of which you speak are of long and slow 
growth, and are firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell 
upon me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had I 
lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a 
devU scoffing at me and them, and asking me what profit 
it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of 
the mass of mankind. To which my only reply was, and is: 
O Devil, truth is better than much profit. I have searched over 
the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and 
fame were all to be lost to me one after another, still I would 
not lie." 

2. But now "truth" as it appeals to Huxley and to the 
scientific mind of which he is a spokesman, has, once more, a 
special and even technical character. Truth is that which can 
be experimentally tested. It is only as we go to the "great 
schoolmaster, experience," that we get the kind of assurance 
on which we have a right to rely; "the man of science has 
learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by veri- 
fication." Huxley is willing to admit, in theory, that even 



176 English and American Philosophy 

science itself is open to speculative doubt. "If there is any- 
thing in the world which I do firmly believe in," he declares, 
"it is the universal validity of the law of causation; but that 
universality cannot be proved by any amount of experience, 
let alone that which comes to us through the senses." Phi- 
losophy, however, has prospered exactly in so far as it has dis- 
regarded such theoretical possibilities of doubt. The "great act 
of faith which leads us to take the experience of the past as a 
safe guide in our dealing with the present and the future," is 
justified by its fruits; to quarrel with the residual uncertainty 
that besets us in matters of science would be "about as reason- 
able as to object to live one's life with due thought for the 
morrow, because no man can be sure he will be alive an hour 
hence." But this assurance has no right to be extended beyond 
the field within which verification in detail is possible; it does 
not permit the scientist, any more than the theologian, to dog- 
matize about the ultimate nature of the world in which natural 
sequences occur. "The universe is, I conceive, like a great game 
being played out, and we poor mortals are allowed to take a 
hand. By great good fortune the wiser among us have made 
out some few of the rules of the game as at present played. 
We call them laws of nature, and honor them because we find 
that if we obey them we win something for our pains. The 
cards are our theories and hypotheses, the tricks our experi- 
mental benefactions. But what sane man would endeavor to 
solve the problem, — given the rules of the game and the win- 
nings, to find whether the cards are made of pasteboard or of 
gold leaf?" 

3. Huxley accordingly conceives that he is standing on a 
fundamentally different platform from that of the ordinary 
scientific materialist. Materialism asserts that matter and 
force are the only and the ultimate realities; "it seems to me 
pretty plain that there is a third thing in the universe, to wit, 
consciousness, which in the hardness of my heart or head 
I cannot see to be matter or force or any conceivable modifi- 



Thomas Huxley 177 

cation of either." Indeed when we come to consider it, we see 
that so-called physical properties are themselves, as Berkeley 
pointed out, reducible to this third fact — conscious sensation. 
At times, accordingly, Huxley would seem to be headed irre- 
sistibly toward Berkeleian idealism. There is however a dif- 
ferent way of looking at the matter, in its place equally 
plausible and necessary, which the scientist at least is unable 
to ignore. For its own purposes, physical science is bound 
to assume the objective existence of a material world; and 
from this angle consciousness is no longer the presupposition 
of matter, but its product. In the scientific sense, it is a func- 
tion of the brain. It is, to be sure, an eflfect of a peculiar sort, 
in that there is no evidence that the nervous processes on their 
side need consciousness to explain their working. From the 
standpoint of science the human body is a mechanism fully 
accounted for in terms of physical law, and consciousness is 
only a collateral product of the action of the brain, as com- 
pletely without influence in modifying its laws as the noise of 
the whistle that accompanies the work of a locomotive is with- 
out influence on its machinery. Nevertheless in spite of this 
one-sidedness, science is bound to regard consciousness as a 
causal product, which presupposes the prior existence of a 
physical basis. 

Here then are two different starting points, both plausible in 
themselves, and yet leading to opposite conclusions; for pur- 
poses of scientific explanation it appears that sensation is a 
function of the motion of matter in the sensorium, while if 
we ask what we know about matter and motion, they in turn 
are merely a name for certain changes in the relations of our 
visual, tactile, and muscular sensations. And the conclusion 
is, that this should be a hint to us that we do not know the 
least thing in the world about how the matter ultimately stands. 
"You see," Huxley writes, "I am quite as ready to admit your 
doctrine that souls secrete bodies as I am the opposite one 
that bodies secrete souls, — simply because I deny the possi- 



178 English and American Philosophy 

bility of obtaining any evidence as to the truth or false- 
hood of either hypothesis. My fundamental axiom of specu- 
lative philosophy is that materialism and spiritualism are 
opposite poles of the same absurdity — the absurdity of imagin- 
ing that we know anything about either spirit or matter." 
However for practical purposes the physical hypothesis is the 
more valuable alternative. For it connects thought with the 
other phenomena of the universe, and suggests inquiry into 
the nature of those physical conditions a knowledge of which 
may in the future help us to exercise the same sort of control 
over the world of thought as over the material world; whereas 
the other terminology is barren. 

It may seem pertinent to ask why Huxley should have put 
himself to all the trouble then of arguing the cause of idealism, 
if in the end he admits that his results are theoretically doubtful 
and practically to be ignored. What is the good of philosophy, 
in other words, and why not have confined ourselves to science 
from the start? In the first place, Huxley replies, man is 
naturally a metaphysical animal, and you cannot keep him 
from thinking about such matters if you try. And in view 
of this there is a value to the inquiry, even if we come out with 
no positive results. "Of all the dangerous mental habits, that 
which schoolboys call 'cocksureness' is probably the most 
perilous," and the inestimable value of metaphysical disci- 
pline is that it furnishes a counterpoise to this evil proclivity. 
"Metaphysical speculation follows as closely upon physical 
theory as black care upon the horseman"; for scientists to 
talk against it with no suspicion of the metaphysics hidden 
away in their own opinions, for them "with mouths full of 
the particular kind of heavily buttered toast which they affect, 
to inveigh against the eating of plain bread," is to discredit 
themselves and science. 

It follows that Huxley's agnosticism is of a quite different 
brand from that of Spencer; it bases itself upon no theory of 
reality, but is, professedly, just a plea for sceptical caution 



Thomas Huxley 179 

in the matter of belief. It is the "sanctification of doubt, the 
recognition that the profession of belief in propositions of the 
truth of which there is no sufficient evidence is immoral, the 
discrowning of authority as such, the repudiation of the con- 
fusion, beloved of sophists of all sorts, between free assent and 
mere piously gagged dissent, and the admission of the obliga- 
tion to reconsider even one's axioms on due demand." Its 
maxims are, positively, in matters of the intellect follow your 
own reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any 
other consideration; negatively, in matters of the intellect do 
not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demon- 
strated or demonstrable. For the agnostic, scepticism is the 
highest of duties, blind faith the unpardonable sin. 

4. Technically, of course, the distinction between the 
materialist and the sceptic is a perfectly definite one. Never- 
theless in his frequent complaints against the injustice of 
classifying him by the former title, it is difficult after all to 
avoid thinking that Huxley is a little disingenuous. There is 
no doubt a verbal difference between saying that matter alone 
is real, and saying that we take reality as material for working 
purposes only. But what actually separates the materialist 
from the spiritualist or idealist is less what he asserts than 
what he denies. "The longer I live," Huxley writes, "and 
the more I learn, the more hopeless to my mind becomes the 
contradiction between the theory of the universe as under- 
stood and expounded by the Jewish and Christian theologians, 
and the theory of the universe which is every day and every 
year growing out of the application of scientific methods to its 
phenomena. Whether astronomy and geology can or cannot 
be made to agree with the statements as to the matters of fact 
laid down in Genesis, whether the Gospels are historically true 
or not, are matters of comparatively small moment in the face 
of the impassable gulf between the anthropomorphism, how- 
ever refined, of theology, and the passionless impersonality of 
the unknown and unknowable which science shows ever5n;vhere 



i8o English and American Philosophy 

underlying the thin veil of phenomena." Here obviously the 
fact that we cannot be sure what reality is like, is taken as 
interchangeable with our duty at any rate to reject confidently 
the supposition that it is spiritual or conscious. And in all its 
practically significant consequences, it is evident there is very 
little to choose between such a result and materialism. 

In his profession of agnosticism here, Huxley has shown 
his usual genius for controversial debate in selecting his ground ; 
the strategic position which he takes up is, of all forms of 
naturalism, the most difficult to meet directly. His opponents, 
who profess to have some positive theory which they are under- 
taking to approve to the reason, are of course bound by the 
rules of the game, and must meet all the assaults which a 
highly acute controversialist, with a mastery of crisp and 
ironic English, well knows how to make effective against so 
complex, and in a sense so personal a thing as a philosophy. 
But if he is held to account for his own metaphysics, — take, 
for example, the sheer contradiction that develops in his treat- 
ment of idealism, — ^he has only to decline politely to make 
himself responsible; he is not pretending at all, he declares, 
to set up a rival system. In such a position however there is 
logically one weak point. What the attitude amounts to in 
the end is scarcely more than this, that Huxley's temperament 
demands a particular kind of proof, short of which he refuses 
to be satisfied. I find the only tolerable amusement, so he tells 
us in a letter, practically in so many words, in intellectual 
problems which are capable of being definitely concluded and 
tested by experiment on concrete fact. I dislike the suspense 
of judgment and the uncertainty attaching to those more in- 
conclusive reasonings that are too complicated, or abstract, or 
subtle, to admit of such a decisive test, and which remain al- 
ways therefore in the class of moral probabilities simply. And 
therefore I decide that only to the first shall be given the name 
of truth; all else is excluded from the realm of profitable in- 
quiry, and he who allows his belief to attach to it is a traitor 



Thomas Huxley i8i 

to the genuine spirit of truth seeking. But once put this in 
plain words, and it becomes evident that while it may be un- 
answerable from the standpoint of the one who actually feels 
that way about it, it is without compulsion for him whose desire 
to know happens not to be limited by such rigid requirements. 
Naturall}'^ this larger conception of truth will still need to be 
controlled by a feeling for rational probability; but so con- 
trolled, it would be distinctly the judgment of common sense 
that it is a proper extension of belief. 

And the rational ground for this would be, that we do not 
in point of fact ever find any human being limiting his belief 
as Huxley would have him limit it. Even Huxley does not 
live up strictly to his own canons; since he was human, it 
would indeed be most surprising to find it otherwise. Refer- 
ence has been made already to the distinction which he draws 
between experimental truths and those unproved postulates 
which experiment already presupposes — the law of causation in 
particular. Here we have one belief, at any rate, which 
is not dependent on, or settled by, a particular experi- 
ment, or any number of particular experiments. So, while 
for philosophy the existence of a physical world must al- 
ways remain problematical, as a postulate demanded by the 
practical needs of science Huxley accords it credence. A 
similar extension of the right to believe appears everywhere in 
Huxley's ethical and social convictions, in spite of the fact that 
he expressly denies to this general field the quality of scien- 
tific truth. Nature clearly validates the larger and subtler 
ideals of human life in a manner much less exact than she 
validates a theory of biology or of physics, and faith, resting 
upon deep-seated preferences, plays a much larger part. 
Huxley's own belief in the supreme virtue of a love for truth 
is itself illustrative of a confidence dependent at least as much 
on the man Huxley, as on a reasoned review of the cases where 
lies and blunders have done injury to mankind, and it would 
not be difficult to find all through his political, economic, and 



1 82 English and American Philosophy 

social creed, instances of strong and even passionate assurance 
where the tone of positiveness goes far beyond the scientific 
certainty of the objective proof. 

5. Huxley's own dealing with ethical theory is compara- 
tively slight, though there is an ethical undertone everywhere 
present to his naturalistic interest, which helps largely to lend 
it weight and impressiveness. As morality rests in a general 
way upon science, and a humble acceptance of the laws of 
nature, so science gets its final justification as the support not 
merely of our practical and industrial success, but of our whole 
social and ethical life as well. "I want the working classes," 
Huxley writes, "to understand that science and her ways are 
great facts for them, — that physical virtue is the base of all 
other, and that they are to be clean and temperate and all the 
rest not because fellows in black with white ties tell them so, 
but because these are plain and patent laws of nature which 
they must obey 'under penalties.' " "Cinderella," he writes 
again in an eloquent and famous passage, "is modestly con- 
scious of her ignorance of these high matters. She lights the 
fire, sweeps the house, and provides the dinner; and is rewarded 
by being told that she is a base creature devoted to low and 
material interests. But in her garret she has fairy visions 
out of the ken of the pair of shrews who are quarreling down- 
stairs. She sees the order which pervades the seeming dis- 
order of the world; the great drama of evolution with its full 
share of pity and terror, but also with abundant goodness and 
beauty, unrolls itself before her eyes, and she learns in her 
heart of hearts the lesson that the foundation of morality is 
to have done, once and for all, with lying, to give up pre- 
tending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and re- 
peating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the 
possibilities of knowledge. She knows that the safety of 
morality lies neither in the adoption of this or that philosophi- 
cal speculation, or this or that theological creed, but in a real 
and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends 



Thomas Huxley 183 

social disorganization upon the track of immorality, as surely 
as it sends physical disease after physical trespasses. And of 
this firm and lively faith it is her high mission to be the 
priestess." 

There is however one special side of Huxley's ethical phi- 
losophy, set forth in his famous essay on Evolution and Ethics, 
which might not seem entirely consistent with his usual con- 
ception of the relation of morality and nature, or with a faith in 
that "abundant goodness and beauty" of which he has spoken. 
And some inconsistency can in fact hardly be escaped, though 
it is not as serious as it might appear. Huxley is thinking now, 
not of the need to take account of the order of nature in the 
attainment of our conscious ends, but of the disposition, not 
uncommon among scientists themselves, to look to nature, or, 
more exactly, to the law of natural selection, as a pattern on 
which human morality is to be modelled; and this disposition 
Huxley strongly repudiates. "I am no pessimist, but also no 
optimist. Of moral purpose I see no trace in nature. This is 
exclusively of human manufacture — and very much to our 
credit." There are for the scientist two questions to be care- 
fully distinguished. The first asks whether evolution accounts 
for morality, — whether, that is, we can discover the natural 
conditions out of which morality has evolved; and this of 
course the theory of evolution presupposes that we can do. 
The second is. Can the principle of evolution itself be adopted 
as an ethical principle? and this Huxley answers emphatically 
in the negative. Rather, in setting up an end and standard of 
its own, morality comes into sharp conflict with nature. Ethi- 
cal progress depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, 
but on combating it; not on following passively its current, 
but on modifying this to our specifically human ends, by 
abolishing the sway of competitive self-interest, and substi- 
tuting a subordination to the general welfare. In turning 
thus to the sphere of human life itself, instead of to deduc- 
tions from cosmic processes, to find the content of moral law, 



184 English and American Philosophy 

Huxley is a truer empiricist than, for example, Spencer; 
though here again it is open to question to what extent the 
results are obtained through the methods of experimental sci- 
ence and a scrutiny of the processes of nature, in separation 
from our tendency to accept on trust the human instincts that 
nature has implanted in us, and the attending sense of values. 



§ 5. Other Naturalistic Philosophers. Clifford. George 
Meredith. Naturalistic Ethics 

1. After Huxley, other representatives of naturalism can 
be passed over more lightly. Huxley's name is closely linked 
with that of Tyndall, who shared with him the obloquy, — 
without being averse, as Huxley was, to accepting the title, — 
of being branded as a materialist. But Tyndall's materialism 
is practically very much the same as Huxley's agnosticism. 
Matter for Tyndall loses all its "crassness," because he sees 
in it the possibility of whatever has actually made its ap- 
pearance in the course of human events; all our philosophy, 
all our poetry, all our science, and all our art — Plato, Shake- 
speare, Newton, and Raphael — are potential in the fires of 
the sun. Interpreted thus, however, materialism has already 
broken its connection with the common notions of matter, 
if not indeed with science even, as a sober method of inquiry 
and a determinate group of laws in particular. 

2. Another defender of the agnostic creed is Leslie Stephen, 
whose interest however lies not so much in promoting science 
as in a protest against the prevalent tendency among advo- 
cates of religion to sidestep the claims of intellectual honesty 
and plain speaking, and to cover up difficulties of belief with 
loose thinking and edifying evasions. The significance of the 
religious experience, very scantily recognized by Stephen, is 
set aside still more peremptorily by Grant Allen, a well-known 
popularizer of science who turned to novel writing for a living. 



Other Naturalistic Philosophers 185 

Here naturalism is completely stripped of the emotional ac- 
companiments which sometimes had obscured and modified its 
normally secular and unideal character. Awe and reverence 
in contemplating the world of nature Allen declares that he 
had never felt. "The agnostic," an acquaintance remarked, 
"says, I don't know; Allen said, There is nothing to be known." 
"No emancipated man," he writes, "feels the need of aught 
to replace superstition" — religion, that is; "he gets rid of 
his bogies root and branch, and there the matter drops for 
him." Unless a man goes all the way with the biologists and 
anthropologists, Allen would rule him out of court at once; 
thus Carlyle is a "cheap imitation thinker," Browning a "smug 
optimist poet." There is one plain goal of knowledge. The 
end of man is to be happy, in reasonable ways of course, but in 
a perfectly direct and naturalistic sense uncomplicated by 
moral or spiritual subtleties. "The old asceticism said: Be 
virtuous and you will be happy; the new hedonism says: Be 
happy and you will be virtuous." Allen thus becomes the 
advocate of that aggressive form of individualism which pro- 
poses to throw off boldly all the restraints of an older and 
religious culture, as merely hampering our natural, and wholly 
unreprehensible, instincts. 

3. Equally "materialistic," but with a wider basis of phi- 
losophy, is Henry Maudsley, a physician with scientific train- 
ing, in whom the physician's tendency to look upon man as 
a complicated bodily machine provides the background for 
a caustic criticism of life and human nature, hardly stopping 
short of cynicism. In Maudsley, along with the other "ideals" 
with which nature, perhaps for our own good, deceives us, there 
tends to go also the ideal which English naturalism for the 
most part had held intact, and indeed had even clothed with 
something of the sanctity of religion — the peculiar virtue of 
intellectual honesty and truth-speaking. As the single mortal 
is inspired to live and strive in hope by his illusions, so may it 
be with the race of mortals; "instead of grieving that life is 



1 86 English and American Philosophy 

so short and joy so transient, the wiser mind may lengthen 
life by putting into it as many illusions as possible, and en- 
joying them to the utmost while they last, — even perhaps, if 
so minded, by deliberately fostering the illusion in order 
to increase the pleasure of it." So of the duties which a per- 
ception of truth is supposed to carry with it. The prevalence 
of an organized system of conventionalism, or so-called 
h5rpocrisy, may justly breed a suspicion of its necessity and 
usefulness. Its survival is plain proof that it has the right to 
survive in the nature of things; and prudence suggests profit 
out of the system by one who lives in it, rather than a doubtful 
attempt to reform it by self-martyrdom in standing out of or 
withstanding it. "To walk warily in the mean, so balancing 
between extremes as to guide well the going, is true wisdom 
of conduct." 

4. More important for philosophy, and, next to Huxley, the 
most intellectually significant, probably, of the scientists who 
espoused a naturalistic philosophy in the latter part of the 
century, is William Kingdon Clifford. Clifford was a brilliant 
young mathematician, whose zeal for "truth" is quite as un- 
compromising as that of Huxley; he who would deserve well 
of his fellows, Clifford writes, will "guard the purity of his 
belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time 
it should rest upon an unworthy object, and catch a stain which 
can never be wiped away." Clifford's notion of truth, however, 
does not turn out to be, either in theory or in practice, quite 
so sure of its meaning as in Huxley's case. What he has in 
mind chiefly to protest against, indeed, is something no self- 
respecting thinker would care to defend — the willingness to 
nourish belief by suppressing doubts, and refusing to investi- 
gate the facts; the fundamental question as to what consti- 
tutes good evidence he leaves more obscure. And as a matter 
of fact his own favorite doctrines show a robust capacity for 
belief, and very positive conclusions are announced concern- 
ing matters of large scope on the basis of somewhat scanty 



W. K. Clifford 187 

argument ; whenever he himself wants badly enough to beheve 
a thing, pragmatic reasons are resorted to without hesitation. 

Clifford frankly turns to metaphysics to get the speculative 
satisfaction which Huxley was willing to forego. One outcome 
is his famous "mind-stuff" theory, which finds the true tj^e 
of reality in the inner life of "feeling," and then extends this 
by analogy to the outer fact which appears phenomenally as 
the world of physical things. The identical bit of reality that 
I know as my own consciousness, my neighbor may perceive 
as nervous tissue; and since my brain is continuous with the 
entire physical environment, it is a plausible conjecture that 
the "real" world also is of a piece with the small section of it 
with which I am directly acquainted in my own psychical life. 
"Panpsychism" has had a considerable vogue since Clifford's 
day, and will receive more attention later; it is sufficient here 
to notice the particular character which in his hands it assumes. 
Instead of conceiving the world as a single comprehensive 
consciousness analogous to our own, as similar theories have 
sometimes done, Clifford thinks of conscious intelligence as 
existing only in connection with organisms; and he inter- 
prets evolution as the gathering up and unifying of what 
originally were separate and extremely simple bits of crude 
feeling, or mind-stuff. Clifford is not sorry to be able in this 
way to detach his philosophy from anything that looks like a 
religious background. There is always a touch of asperity in 
his references to religion, due apparently in large measure 
to his dislike of the clerical character; "I can find," he remarks 
in one place, "no evidence that seriously militates against 
the rule that the priest is at all times and in all places the 
enemy of all men." 

What is essentially a religion, nevertheless, in the form of 
"cosmic emotion," Clifford himself brings back through the 
medium of another concept — that of Humanity. Clifford is 
one of the most eloquent champions of that notion of the "social 
consciousness" which affects increasingly the tone of natural- 



1 88 English and American Philosophy 

istic thought in the latter part of the century. Even his epis- 
temology rests upon the "social." Although in the mind-stuff 
theory the entire world of nature appears as having an existence 
— as mind-stuff — independent of the psychical contents of my 
knowing mind, and even, most of it, independent of the minds 
of other human beings, Clifford's explicit theory of knowledge 
starts from the traditional English doctrine that the "object" 
is only a group of my own sensations, the "externality" of the 
object being then interpreted as the recognition of a similarity 
of content in the minds of my social fellows.^ This, it should 
be remarked, implies that at any rate the knowledge of another 
man's consciousness — what Clifford calls an "eject" — takes 
me beyond any sensation of my own; and from so strenuous a 
foe of imauthorized belief one is entitled to expect an explana- 
tion of our scientific right to this extremely convenient ex- 
tension of our knowledge. Clifford is too much interested 
however in further consequences to stop for this. The con- 
sequences are those for ethics. If Society can give us our be- 
lief in the physical world, even more certainly is it the creator 
of the moral conscience. Conscience is the judgment of the 
"tribal self" on the individual self, the voice of Man within 
us commanding us to work for Man. It grows out, not of 
individual, but of social experience, and has to do with the 
survival of the tribe as a tribe in the struggle for existence. 
Accordingly the moral end, or virtue, is not my greatest happi- 
ness; it is not altruism even, or the doing good to others as 
individuals. It is increased efficiency as a citizen, the service 
of society by a member of it, who loses in that service the 
consciousness that he is anything different from the com- 
munity itself. Here Clifford is apt to leave the impression that 
it is a gospel rather than a scientific theory which he is 
promulgating; in the end his philosophy grows almost lyrical, 
and humanity fuses with the notion of cosmic reality to form 
a new object of devotion. "From the dim dawn of History 

^Lectures and Essays, Vol. II, pp. 52 ff. 



W. K. Clifford 189 

and from the inmost depth of every soul, the face of our 
Father Man looks out upon us with the fire of eternal youth 
in his eyes, and says, Before Jehovah was, I am." In place 
of the personal immortaHty of religion, the fancy of another 
life "monstrous or supernatural, whose cloudy semblance shall 
be eked out with the dreams of uneasy sleep, or the crazes 
of a mind diseased," we are to put the nobler thought of 
identity with a communal Life "wider and greater, that shall 
live when we as units shall have done with living." 

5. Even more fervid than Clifford in his anticipations of a 
new dispensation is William Winwood Reade, whose strange 
and powerful book, the Martyrdom of Man, had an influence 
on not a few of his contemporaries. Reade also was inspired 
by a profound antipathy to religion, and a profound faith in 
science as destined to be the means of a regenerated race. 
With the weapons of science disease will be exterminated, 
men will make their way to distant planets, will master the 
forces of nature, will become themselves architects of systems 
and manufacturers of worlds. Man then will be perfect; he 
will be what the vulgar worship as a God. But Man, who 
thus "invents immortality," is not to be identified with par- 
ticular, private men, those "dots of animated jelly." There 
is only one Man upon the earth; what we call men are not 
individuals, but components; what we call death is merely the 
bursting of a cell ; wars and epidemics are merely inflammatory 
phenomena incident on certain stages of growth. "If we look 
at the life of a single atom ... all appears to be cruelty and 
confusion; but when we survey mankind as One, we find it 
becoming more and more noble, more and more divine, slowly 
ripening towards Perfection." To sink our private ambitions 
in the good of the race, to place our hope in the happiness 
of posterity, and our faith in the perfectibility of man, is the 
new religion which is to take the place of the old. 

6. This growing emphasis on humanity, with its attendant 
note of emotion, in contrast with the cooler and more indi- 



190 English and American Philosophy 

vidualistic temper of Utilitarianism, is due in considerable 
measure to the influence on English thought of the French 
philosopher Comte. Although the two strains merge in J. S. 
Mill, in general they are separate enough to lend a distinctive 
character to the positivistic naturalism of the latter part of 
the century. One vein here is struck in the personal creed of 
George Eliot; it is relatively not a common one however, and 
has its evident source in special peculiarities of temperament. 
None of the Utilitarians had been wont to take very seriously 
the pleasure doctrine in their private scheme of existence; in 
George Eliot the very word tends to disappear. "All the seri- 
ous relations of life become so much more real indeed," she 
writes in a letter; "pleasure seems so slight a thing, and sorrow 
and duty and endurance so great." In a world in which the 
"difficulty of the human lot" is that which of all things is 
most perfectly known to us, man's highest calling and election 
is to "do without opium, and live through all our pain with 
conscious, clear-eyed endurance." And this same note of 
weariness, of low vitality, pervades even the ideal of service 
to Humanity which remains as the one positive motive to 
give significance to human living. "I try," she writes, "to 
take delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never 
see it any more," — a poor substitute, most men are likely 
to feel, for the possibilities of realized good in the present, 
especially when the reasons seem so doubtful for expecting 
future generations to make any greater success o^^ an enter- 
prise that hitherto has shown nothing but failure. 

This subdued and despondent mood is, however, altogether 
foreign to the more tj^ical positivist. Whatever fault he may 
have to find with the present world, — and of its intellectual 
merits at any rate he has a low opinion, — there never is any 
question that a brilliant future is about to dawn. By some 
of the closer disciples of Comte a Positivist Church was 
formed in England, concerning which great hopes for a time 
were entertained. Richard Congreve, who was largely influ- 



The Positivists 191 

ential in starting the movement, was a Comtian of almost 
evangelical fervor and orthodoxy; younger associates of Con- 
greve are Robert Bridges, James Cotter Morison, and, in par- 
ticular, Frederic Harrison, the best known and most prolific 
of the group. In Harrison the peculiarities of Comte's auto- 
cratic and dogmatic temper appear in a much subdued form, 
and the religion of Humanity, interpreted as morality fused 
with social devotion, and enlightened by sound philosophy, be- 
comes a persuasive call to brotherhood based on human rather 
than on supernatural sanctions. It may be questioned, how- 
ever, whether the devotional tinge that still attaches to the 
"organic" notion of the human race can maintain itself in- 
definitely against its naturalistic background, or whether the 
admonition habitually to make of this a "converging point of 
one's whole existence, thoughts, feelings, and labor," is not 
calculated to encourage the sort of idealistic sentimentalism 
which Sir James Stephen found so distasteful. 

7. In English positivism, the naturalistic background tends 
on the whole to be somewhat overlaid with ethical humanitari- 
anism. One further and important representative of a purer 
form of naturalism, in whom "cosmic emotion" is made to 
center less on Humanity, and more on the natural conditions 
of man's life, is George Meredith, in whose verse it receives a 
specially felicitous expression. Here, along with an insistence 
on the faith that the whole content of human life is rooted 
in our "Mother Nature" — Earth, — and achieves nothing but 
unreality and self-defeat when it tries to separate itself from 
her bosom, there goes also a strong dislike for the pedestrian 
and utilitarian qualities of commonplace materialism, and a 
sustained glow of feeling through which the real is itself 
transmuted into the ideal, losing its grossness without en- 
deavoring to make its escape to a different and "higher" realm. 
Meredith would hold his way equally between "the unreal and 
the over-real which delight mankind"; the noble enthusiasms — 
art, humanity, justice — he would hold to and exalt, while rest- 



192 English and American Philosophy 

ing them on the normal processes of nature. The Earth is not 
dead matter; it is the living mother of us all. And man is 
nature's great achievement; in man's brain, the powers of 
nature are focussed and become self-conscious. 

She conscient, she sensitive, in him; 
With him enwound, his brave ambition hers; 
By him humaner made; by his keen spurs 
Pricked to race past the pride in giant limb, 
Her crazy adoration of big thews. 

So man on his side too must recognize himself as a product 
of natural conditions. All the hopes and aspirations that seem 
to free him from earth's limitations are in reality her own 
work in him; if man 

aloft for aid 
Imploring storms, her essence is the spur. 
His cry to heaven is a cry to her 
He would evade. 

And as he sees more clearly, as his intellect matures and comes 
to take command over the heart and the imagination, he will 
learn to limit his desires to what earth has to offer, and give 
up his unfounded dreams. The "ideal" which is the glorified 
heritage of earth is thus no vague emotional yearning, no 
creation of the heart "untamed to tone its passions under 
thought." Intellect is man's addition to the sum of things; 
and clear-seeing intellect is the first requirement of the ideal 
life for its successful career. This has its interpretation and 
expression in Meredith's notion of the function of Comedy. 
Comedy — "sword of Common Sense" — is just the criticism 
of human life through the use of the intellect. "The source 
of his wit," he writes of Moliere, "is clear reason: it is a foun- 
tain of that soil; and it springs to vindicate reason, common- 
sense, rightness and justice." To dissipate the inveterate dis- 
position of men to live in a "hazy atmosphere that they sup- 
pose an ideal one," and to bring ideals back into connection 
with the fact, is for Meredith the great aim of Comedy. 



Edith Simcox 193 

8. One field of naturalistic effort remains to be dealt with 
a little more fully here — that of a scientific theory of ethics. 
In addition to those already mentioned, there are several 
further independent essays at an evolutionary and positivistic 
treatment of the moral life. One of these, which has points 
of affinity with Meredith's philosophy, is a volume entitled 
Natural Law by Edith Simcox, — a book of considerable dis- 
tinction as well as logical power. Here hedonism and utili- 
tarianism are relegated to a subordinate place, in favor of a 
naturalistic version of the perfectionist ideal, motivated by a 
somewhat austerely aesthetic admiration of "conformity to 
type," True ''good-for-man" is determined by the natural 
forces which in their development have issued in the human 
organism, and which at the same time have moulded sub- 
jective feelings that instinctively approve the resulting handi- 
work. The norm to which natural evolution has thus affixed 
the sense of approval is action "after our kind," as imperfec- 
tion and vice are a departure from the class type; the end of 
life is the making of oneself as fine a specimen of humanity 
as possible, through the development and exercise of the 
greatest number of natural faculties in their fullest possible 
perfection. Meanwhile however it is to be remembered that 
forces from behind, in the natural world, not inducements 
ahead of us, are what most fundamentally condition virtue; 
so that even "perfection," to say nothing of pleasure, is not the 
motive, but is only a formulation of the natural law that really 
moves us. It is perhaps a fair question to ask of such a 
philosophy why, even granting that the long pressure of events 
has created an admiration for the ideal of "t3^icar' man, this 
particular approval feeling should possess any advantage over 
other admirations. Any ideal, if it exists, must have the same 
source in evolution as any other; and the naturalist has no 
apparent ground for picking out his own pet ideal as nature's 
end, apart from the fact that he has an individual preference 
for it — ^which is no longer Science. And there are other moods 



194 English and American Philosophy 

in which our moral feeling is more likely to be found in protest 
against the demand that we identify ourselves "with the su- 
preme tendency of the universe to exist as it does." Neverthe- 
less a feeling for the dignity of the actual, and for the claim 
which existing fact makes upon the will, is a genuine feeling, 
though it may need to be supplemented and corrected; and a 
Spinozistic ideal of duty as the "active cooperation of the indi- 
vidual with all the real forces of the universe, in proportion 
to their reality," and of religion as a devout and affectionate 
acquiescence in this nature of essential being, is capable of 
some edifying power, and much aesthetic charm. 

9. Another essay at reconstructing ethical theory by plac- 
ing it upon a "scientific" basis, is the youthful work of Alfred 
Barratt, — a sketchy attempt to reduce ethical conduct to the 
fundamental properties of animal tissue, and the ultimate basis 
of morals to a reasonable obedience to the physical laws of 
nature. Much less narrowly biological in tone is S. Alexander's 
Moral Order and Progress, where the essence of morality is 
found in the concept of "equilibrium." Of most importance 
however in this connection is Leslie Stephen's Science of 
Ethics. Here an evolutionary morality receives perhaps its 
most thoughtful and judicious formulation. Starting with the 
assumption that "good" means everything that favors happi- 
ness, Stephen proceeds to modify historic Utilitarianism in 
several ways. To begin with, it is not future pleasure which 
determines choice, but the present pleasurableness of the idea, 
— the pleasantest judgment, rather than the judgment of what 
is pleasantest. Consequently there is no guarantee that a man 
will choose what he himself knows intellectually is for his 
greatest ultimate good. Nor does it follow that because an 
act is determined by a man's own feeling, the end is his own 
happiness. Stephen agrees with Spencer that science demands 
a more objective standard than feeling supplies; and he looks 
for this in the same general direction, through the application 
of biology to the conception of a social organism. Among 



Leslie Stephen 195 

the characteristics of human nature, there are some which 
may intelligibly be said to be self-regarding, and independent 
of society, in the sense in which an apple, though it could not 
exist apart from the tree, may vary in color while the relation 
to the tree remains approximately constant. But we may also 
distinguish other characters in man which are due primarily 
to the presence of opinions and feelings in the minds of his 
fellows, and which vary therefore directly with changes in 
other parts of the social body. Apart from this social rela- 
tionship, accordingly, such characters would be unintelligible; 
and by virtue of his possession of them the individual is to be 
interpreted, not as a separate unit, but as "social tissue." 

Now morality has to do with conduct in so far as it is thus 
influenced by the pressure of the community, acting for ends 
that do not have the individual as such in view; and therefore 
its "law" is to be looked for outside the realm of private 
feeling. Given a certain character or type of organization, the 
agent does what gives him pleasure; but if you ask how he 
came to have this character, you must refer to conditions of 
existence that are not deducible from the nature of the xmit 
which has been shaped by them. We need accordingly in 
explaining morality to go beyond pleasure, to the objective 
circumstances which render a certain form of organization suc- 
cessful, and able to hold its place in the evolutionary process; 
that in the individual is "good" which constitutes him vigorous 
social tissue, — which fits him, that is, to play his part in a 
society capable of surviving in the struggle for existence. 
Health, power and persistence, social vitality, the maximum 
total efficiency, — this, not happiness, represents the true moral 
criterion ; the moral law of goodness and duty is a statement of 
the conditions essential to the vitality of the social system. It 
is true that since pleasure normally attaches to a state of 
equilibrium, there is bound to be an approximate coincidence 
of pleasure and of health. But the coincidence is not com- 
plete; and pleasure calculation cannot be wholly depended on 



196 English and American Philosophy 

therefore even for the momentary judgment. Even if it be 
true that we wish for health merely as a means of pleasure, the 
only comprehensive rule for obtaining pleasure is to secure this 
general condition. And meanwhile human nature is not a 
constant, but a variable, whose modification is the primary aim 
of the moralist. And for the comparison of different types of 
organization, the pleasure criterion is useless; since happiness 
itself changes as society develops, we cannot compare two 
societies at different stages as if they were more or less efficient 
machines for obtaining an identical product. Utility in the 
sense of life-preserving, then, is more fundamental than utility 
in the sense of pleasure-giving. Evolution guarantees the apn 
proximation of the two, but not their identity. What it postu- 
lates is only that man will acquire instincts that fit him for 
the general conditions of life; and in particular cases it is quite 
possible this may cause him to be more miserable than if he 
were without them. 

But while the cause of moral conduct is thus to be found in 
social utility, it does not follow that this is the end which 
men have consciously in view. In the process of evolution in- 
stinctive feelings of disgust or admiration arise which act inde- 
pendently of any conscious perception of utility, and which, 
as society grows more reasonable, develop into the approval of 
a certain sort of character. The ultimate form of the moral 
law is, in consequence. Be this, rather than. Do this; and 
such a shift of emphasis is itself "useful" as the sign of the 
highest organized type, since a rule for conduct can be laid 
down far more simply and exhaustively in terms of the inner 
disposition that leads to action, than in terms of a multitude 
of varying external acts. The Utilitarian principle presui> 
poses, then, a problem which is solved through the generating 
of a t3^e so constituted that evils perceived are intrinsically 
hateful to it, without calling for an explicit recognition of their 
consequences. In the moral sentiment, Stephen finds sympathy 
largely implicated, as the Utilitarians generally had done. 



Leslie Stephen 197 

His theory of sympathy, however, has a touch of novelty. 
Sympathy is involved, that is, in the very possibility of 
knowing other persons. To be acquainted with the inner life 
of my neighbor I must possess already the means of interpret- 
ing it through feelings of my own; and I cannot therefore 
properly know what he feels, without feeling what he feels, 
finding my pleasure and pain in common with him therefore, 
and so becoming part of a larger whole which determines to 
this extent the law of my nature. 



§ 6. Evolution and Religion. Browmng 

I. The theory of evolution did not, of course, carry with it 
everywhere naturalistic consequences. In spite of the early 
odium which it excited, there was not lacking from the start a 
disposition even among men of a religious temper to accept 
it, as a matter of fact and of science, without giving up their 
religious convictions. Thus among the physiologists William 
B. Carpenter, a great name in his day, still held firmly to his 
Unitarian faith; by restoring to the notion of causation the 
older idea of dynamic power, he was able to argue for the 
necessity of a God behind material phenomena, to whose cre- 
ative will their physical potencies are due, while still leaving 
the actual course of events to be determined by scientific in- 
vestigation. It is true there was a tendency in many quarters 
to limit to some extent the scientific possibilities of evolution- 
ary theory. Even Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of 
natural selection, denied its ability to explain certain facts of 
man's psychical life, such as the mathematical and musical 
faculties; though it is not perfectly clear whether he thought 
that an adequate explanation here would compel us to look 
beyond the realm of natural causes altogether. In the case of 
others who accepted the principle of development in the large, 
the disposition is explicit to suppose that breaks occur in the 



198 English and American Philosophy 

evolutionary process which involve genuine new beginnings, 
more particularly in connection with the appearance of life, of 
consciousness, and of the higher forms of consciousness such as 
reason and the moral conscience. A vigorous representative of 
this latter attitude is the Catholic naturalist St. George Mivart; 
reason, in particular, is for Mivart a new departure which 
sharply separates man from the brutes, and without which, 
as a source of ultimate and self-evident truths, the whole basis 
and possibility of science itself would disappear. 

2. A typical attempt to show the consistency of evolution- 
ary theory with a religious background, is that of John Fiske, 
whose Concord lectures on religious philosophy had, deservedly, 
a wide reading. Fiske was a thoroughgoing disciple of Spencer, 
and his first venture in philosophy was a resume of the Spen- 
cerian doctrine. Even in this early volume there is a dis- 
position to interpret the Unknowable in a manner less rigorous 
that might appear to be its meaning on the surface, through 
the recognition of an implicit reasonableness in nature, and 
an underlying kinship between man and the eternal Energy, 
which renders it not improper to assign to this last in some 
vague sense a quasi-personal form. Later Fiske added the 
more explicit conception of an immanent teleology, with man, 
and the higher human qualities, as the end toward which de- 
velopment has been tending. In proof of this he cites the 
fact that nature's efforts at this point turn from the creation 
of new organs, to the development of intelligence and con- 
sciousness, intelligence more and more taking in charge the 
course of progress even in the environing world, and altruistic 
sympathy progressively reducing the scope of the struggle for 
existence. In this revelation of purpose Fiske finds the sug- 
gestion also of an immortal destiny for man. Such a fonn of 
teleology he thinks does not compete with science, since divine 
action is now identified with orderly action, and not contrasted 
with it. Teleology is a dramatic tendency which we discover 
empirically in the evolutionary process as a whole, and does 



John Fiske 199 

not profess to supply an explanation of anything in detail; 
all the scientific difficulties have arisen from the conception 
of an Augustinian or external deity, and have no application 
to a God conceived as immanent in the world, and its animat- 
ing power. Fiske's conclusions are rather too facile to be 
always clear to analysis; thus the sense in which we have a 
right to clothe God in human attributes — and so to make 
him knowable — is left pretty much in the dark by the claim 
that he is "quasi"-personal and quasi-psychical. But as a 
popularizer of what may be said to meet the commonplaces of 
a scientific criticism of purpose, Fiske has had few equals. 

3. Another American scientist with religious interests, who 
also brings a considerable gift for philosophizing to the ap- 
praisal of the evolutionary process, is Joseph Le Conte. Le 
Conte has a very similar doctrine of the immanency of God in 
nature; but he is more specific in defining his meaning. It is 
not that spirit is at work in a universe of matter. The natural 
world is God's life, and its laws are his direct activity; the 
phenomena of nature are objectified modes of divine thought, 
and natural forces are forms of the divine will. Man's own 
spirit is a spark of this divine energy individuated, by a process 
of evolution which passes through a line of lower psyches to 
the point of self-consciousness; here it not only becomes sep- 
arated from nature and capable of an independent life, but 
it enters into a new relationship to God, who now operates, 
not by natural law, but by a revelation to the reason and the 
conscience. The ultimate difficulties in the way of such an 
attempt to combine pantheism with independent human per- 
sonality, Le Conte has in the end to meet by an appeal to 
the limitations of human reason. 

4. One other name is of interest here because it repre- 
sents a conversion to the religious hj^othesis from the extreme 
naturalistic camp. George Romanes is one of the ablest of 
the biological psychologists, whose most important work is a 
detailed endeavor to show the possibility of explaining the 



200 English and American Philosophy 

life of intelligence in evolutionary terms. In early life Ro- 
manes had published anonymously an uncompromising argu- 
ment in behalf of atheism. But he later came to believe that 
a place for design may still be found if we shift from the 
narrow basis of special adaptations to the broad area of 
nature as a whole; when we ask the question, How is it that 
all physical causes have conspired by their united action to 
the production of a general order of Nature? there is some 
ground for the rational conclusion that there must be a cause 
for this cooperation of causes. A more general basis, obscurely 
defined, not only for theistic but for Christian belief, in the 
form of special moral and spiritual instincts different from the 
organs of knowledge in the proper or scientific sense, is sug- 
gested in the unfinished notes of what was to have been a 
book entitled A Candid Examination of Religion. 

5. There remains a very miscellaneous group of names, 
where the interest also centers about the notion of science 
in its relation to religion or the spiritual life, which this is 
perhaps as good a place as any to refer to briefly. From 
the standpoint of a Christian believer the Duke of Argyle is 
the author of various writings, of which the Reign of Law is 
the best known. The thesis of the book, which has no scien- 
tific value, is that the supernatural should properly be defined, 
not as that which works without natural means, but as a use 
of natural means such as lies beyond human knowledge, or 
beyond human power to effect. And by conceiving law in 
terms of a multitude of active entities or "forces" existing in 
the imiverse, each "necessary" and resisting all attempts to 
violate it, but capable of being "overruled" by other laws, or 
of combining with tiiem to produce such results as a control- 
ling agent may desire, design, and special Providence, and 
miracle even, are supposed to have shown their compatibility 
with the demands of science and the universal reign of Law. 
A book also addressed to the task of vindicating Christianity 
in the eyes of science is Henry Drummond's Natural Law in 



Henry Drummond 201 

the Spiritual World. Drummond was a successful inspirational 
lecturer before evangelical audiences; and he assumes that all 
that is needed in order to legitimize to the modem mind the 
religious concepts of the spiritual life, — which he thinks suf- 
ficiently defined by the vague notion of "life in Christ" as 
understood by evangelical religion, — is to point to spiritual 
''laws" comparable to the scientific laws of nature. The dis- 
covery of various analogies between scientific concepts and 
the current interpretation of Christian experience is used to 
show that the two realms have an organic unity. Another 
book by Drummond, the Ascent of Man, proposes to correct 
the one-sidedness of the current scientific interpretation of 
natural selection, or the Struggle for Life, by identifying this 
with the struggle for food, and then finding the source of 
spiritual and moral values in another aspect of nature's proc- 
esses, in the shape of a sentimentalized version of Reproduc- 
tion, or the Struggle for the Life of Others. 

6. In a quite different vein is a volume which, at the close 
of the century, also received for a time wide acclaim as an 
evolutionary justification of religion. Benjamin Kidd's Social 
Evolution, the most successful representative of a not infre- 
quent tendency among the sociologists to combine an effect of 
very rigorous scientific method with some of the characteristics 
of the romantic drama, is a defence of the thesis that religion 
is a non-rational factor, — there is no such thing as a "rational 
religion," — which is essential to the possibility of progress. 
The thesis presupposes various dogmas which it is not thought 
necessary to justify, — in particular, that progress is primarily 
a matter of natural selection in the interests of the race, that it 
necessitates therefore a constant conflict with the interests of 
the individual man in the present and his unwilling subordina- 
tion to future generations, and that human reason is nothing 
but an instrument devoted to securing these personal interests 
of the individual. It follows that a man can find no "rational" 
justification for plunging into a deadly struggle which will 



202 English and American Philosophy 

only benefit generations still unborn. And if therefore prog- 
ress is not to be slain by the weapon it has itself brought into 
existence, the intellect must be held in check by some force not 
as such intellectual or rational; and this it seems is precisely 
the role we find religion playing in history. An interesting 
part of the argument is its interpretation of the role of altru- 
ism. This the evolutionists had commonly regarding as check- 
ing the universal struggle. Kidd holds that it renders it in 
reality more intense, by destroying artificial lines of caste, 
and so bringing all men alike, under something like an equality 
of conditions, into the competitive arena; and it does this 
primarily by weakening the resisting power of the possessing 
classes through lessening their morale, and thus rendering them 
more vulnerable to attacks from below. 

7. One further application of the notion of evolution to a 
philosophy of the spiritual life, though here we leave behind 
altogether the peculiar interests of science, is to be found in 
the poetry of Robert Browning. Browning's interest in phi- 
losophy may indeed easily be exaggerated. What he really 
cares most about is the drama of human life and character, the 
inner adventures of the soul, and the emotional crises in which 
the significance of our deeds comes home to us most closely 
and vividly. Browning's distinctive concern for emotion is thus 
not for its own sake as the end and justification of living; 
neither is he engaged in a merely psychological display of its 
inner anatomy as a fact of natural history. What interests 
him is the inner logic of emotion, the self-revealing and world- 
revealing character it bears. The emotion is significant as a 
stage, a moment, in the forward push of life; and so it is 
emotion intellectualized, and made to serve as a rational guide 
for conduct. 

In certain general consequences of this Browning's own 
philosophy may be said to consist. What most directly fol- 
lows is the conception of life as a probation. As emotion is 
the sort of experience in which we are made to realize under 



Robert Browning 203 

the stress of some critical and revealing situation our real 
drift, and the worth or emptiness of the ends we have been 
pursuing, it is always a step to new possibilities, and so it re- 
veals life in its character not as a finished attainment, but as 
a preparation for something still to come more adequate to the 
capacities of human nature. For the healthy and normal soul 
this justifies the forward look needed to give hopeful interest 
and zest to a future in which "the best is yet to be"; for the 
soul that has squandered its powers it offers the chance that 
comes from the realization of failure, since even death may be 
the great final moment of self-revelation, and so the transfer 
to that realm 

Where God unmakes but to remake the soul 
He else first made in vain. 

Hence too the insistence upon a divine discontent as the saving 
salt of life; upon the peril of dull acquiescence and stagnation; 
upon the demand that we welcome failure that comes from 
setting our aims too high, rather than "vulgarly in the low 
aim succeed"; upon the preferableness of an experiment even 
in wrong-doing — since this at least affords a chance for learn- 
ing the lessons of experience — to a negative blamelessness that 
is due to cowardice or inertia. 

8. One specifically doctrinal form to which this leads in 
Browning is his belief in immortality. Immortality is funda- 
mental for him because it is needed to give scope, and an ap- 
plicability to things in the long run, to his attitude toward ex- 
perience. It is in dealing with this belief that Browning is 
most explicitly the philosopher. The same motive is also 
fundamental in a second main article of his creed — his strong 
faith, amounting to practical certainty, that life "means in- 
tensely and means good." This confidence itself is not the 
result of argument, and is indeed seldom directly argued about; 
it is already implicit in that sense of the significance and in- 
terestingness of life which is at the root of his activity as a 



204 English and American Philosophy 

poet. Indirectly however it leads again to philosophy through 
the need of giving some standing to the fact of evil. Here 
also it is to the probationary character of life that Browning 
turns. While his optimism is far from ignoring the facts of 
evil, it cannot be said that evil constitutes for him the stum- 
bling-block which the modern thinker so often has found it. 
His tone toward it is seldom apologetic; rather it appeals to 
him on its positive side as a means of grace, a rebuff to be 
welcomed because it calls forth in us the exercise of powers 
that otherwise might have lost their chance. Indeed God 
himself would be limited without the power to suffer, and 
man through the possibility of self-sacrifice would be superior 
to his Maker; hence the peculiar religious importance of the 
doctrine of the Incarnation. 

To the mind which likes to place our present mixed world 
alongside an imaginary state of perfection, and then lament the 
contrast, this treatment of evil will probably seem to make 
too little of the ugly facts. But it is not certain that the 
failure in realism might not be retorted against the objector. 
Much current invective against the hard-heartedness of God or 
nature, which supposes itself, in opposition to a foggy and 
sentimental optimism, peculiarly sympathetic, clear-seeing, and 
unprejudiced, is vitiated in a measure by the tendency, typi- 
cally unscientific, to mass the facts and trust to their collective 
emotional appeal, instead of disentangling and estimating them 
in detail in their concrete setting. Browning's contention is, 
in effect, that if you want to know what evil is you must watch 
it actually at work; and in doing this you discover, not by 
deduction from the general principle that a particular evil 
may be a universal good, but by its actual consequences in 
this or that man's life, that it may, if we so will, be put to 
account, and that "sudden the worst turns best for the brave." 
And it is in the strong man's attitude, rather than the weak- 
ling's, that we get the best evidence for the genuine character 
of the real world. 



Robert Browning 205 

9, There is one further and more general deduction from 
Browning's way of viewing life. It follows from his whole 
outlook that feeling is a valid clue to the character of reality, 
when safeguarded by a cautious self-criticism through the in- 
tellect. Browning repudiates the claims of reason in its tra- 
ditional form. He will not allow that man can attain to more 
than proximate and probable knowledge, or that in logic he 
possesses other than an imperfect and tentative instrument. 
Indeed a complete insight is not desirable even; the finer 
products of human experience, as a constant growth and en- 
deavor, could not thrive if the whole issue were fully grasped, 
and "guesses turned to knowledge absolute." Reason must be 
helped out by those less articulate clues to meaning that are to 
be found in man's inner spiritual life. In appealing to emo- 
tional sources of truth Browning is cautious and moderate. 
We have in feeling no mystical insight that does away with 
the need for thoughtful interpretation and cautious judgment. 
But that in the higher reaches of man's experience, more 
especially in the fact of human love, we do come in contact 
with what is too self-evidently fundamental to be excluded 
from our ultimate philosophy as a mere episode and irrelevance 
in the universe, Browning is thoroughly persuaded. 

It is in love that Browning comes nearest to getting beyond 
the thoroughgoing temporalism to which the logic of his po- 
sition might seem to point him, — the substitution of eternal 
effort, namely, for achievement. The natural mind will always 
view with suspicion an ideal which postpones fulness of satis- 
faction to an everlasting striving, which would not be striving 
did it not contain the seeds of discontent; there must be 
victory as well as the excitement of the fray. And for this two 
ways are open. Either we must repudiate growth as a final 
ideal, and look to the time when growth ceases and rest super- 
venes upon it; or else in changing experience itself there must 
be some quality of perfect attainment. Knowledge, for Brown- 
ing at any rate, cannot serve for this; finished knowledge is 



206 English and American Philosophy 

impossible in fact, and if it were possible it would need a 
finished world. Somewhere in the life of feeling the goal must 
exist if it exists at all. There are various directions in which 
philosophy has looked for this, — in religion, for example, or in 
art. With at least an equal right Browning finds the ultimate 
and satisfying experience in love, — that comprehensive emo- 
tional relationship which opens up the possibility of a settled 
sense of good not only in the midst of the changing circum- 
stances of life, but by very reason of this change, since fel- 
lowship implies, not fixed conditions, but a constant interplay 
of action. For the intellect 

The prize is in the process; knowledge means 
Ever renewed assurance by defeat, 
That victory is somehow still to reach ; 
But love is victory, the prize itself. 



CHAPTER V 
ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 

§ I. Transcendentalism in Literature. Carlyle. Emerson 

I. The conflict between science and religion so much 
talked about in the latter part of the century, and to which a 
brief reference has already been made in the preceding chapter, 
resulted in what may fairly be called a draw. On the one 
side science achieved its main object. It no longer is neces- 
sary that it should fight for the privilege of pursuing its own 
distinctive work unhampered by vested intellectual interests; 
nowadays science moves freely and without hindrance, and 
indeed at times with something of a swagger. On the other 
hand, the establishment of a purely naturalistic creed as the 
necessary basis for this immunity cannot be said to have had a 
similar success. Naturalism found itself opposed with growing 
confidence by rival philosophies, which proposed to reinterpret 
the universe in various way to vindicate its spiritual mean- 
ing, while also taking care to avoid any clash with such results 
as science proper might affirm. In general these efforts fall 
into two classes. The first does not depart very widely from 
the traditional attitude of English philosophy, and so, in spite 
of disagreements, it can meet and contend with naturalism on 
something like a common metaphysical ground. The second 
is equally concerned, from the standpoint of an interest which, 
at the start at least, was definitely religious, to show the de- 
ficiencies of the naturalistic creed; but it proceeds in a much 
more drastic way through a reconstruction of the whole theory 
of knowledge and of reality, so' that mcidentally its criticism 

207 



2o8 English and American Philosophy 

is almost as hostile to the current forms of theism as to 
naturalism. This English adaptation of German Idealism at- 
tracted during the last quarter of the century a large pro- 
portion of the best speculative intellect of England and Amer- 
ica, attaining in the universities a dominance that for a time 
was almost complete. 

2. Before taking it up however in its technical form, cer- 
tain more popular expressions of what is in part the same 
idealistic tendency deserve to be noticed more briefly. In 
England, the chief representative of this is Thomas Carlyle. 
The root of what is most characteristic in Carlyle may be 
traced in the first instance to his peculiarly active and deep- 
lying sense of the mystery of this "strangest of all possible 
worlds." For him the universe is not "a warehouse, or at best 
a Fancy Bazaar, but a mystic Temple and Hall of Doom." 
Consider that most common and familiar of facts, the fact of 
time. "Rough Samuel and sleek wheedling James were and 
are not," he writes in the review of Boswell. "Their Life and 
whole personal Environment has melted into air. The Mitre 
Tavern still stands in Fleet Street; but where now is its scot- 
and-lot paying, beef-and-ale loving, cocked-hatted, pot-bellied 
Landlord; its rosy-faced, assiduous Landlady, with all her 
smiling brass-pans, waxed tables, well-fitted larder-shelves; 
her cooks and boot-jacks and errand-boys, and watery-mouthed 
hangers-on? Gone! gone! The becking Waiter who, with 
wreathed smiles, was wont to spread for Samuel and Bozzy 
their supper of the Gods, has long since pocketed his last 
sixpence, and vanished, sixpences and all, like a ghost at cock- 
crowing. ... Of the Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls 
remain; of London, of England, of the World, nothing but 
the bare walls remain; and these also decaying (were they of 
adamant), only slower. The mysterious River of Existence 
rushes on; a new billow thereof has arrived, and lashes wildly 
as ever around the old embankments; but the former Billow, 
with its loud, mad eddyings, where it it? Where!" 



Thomas Carlyle 209 

There is however something more to add to this, which with 
Carlyle is all-important. No soul can long nourish itself on 
blank wonder. But the life that is to inform this wonder- 
provoking universe must come, not from without, where mys- 
tery alone lies, but from within. The human conscience, the 
perception of the infinite difference between right and wrong, 
is the clue to the understanding of this blind world ; the knowl- 
edge to which Carlyle summons man is the knowledge which 
has to do with his duty. Theoretical knowledge is a very 
different matter. We know that the world is a righteous world, 
and that its laws are the laws of eternal justice; but we know 
this as an affair of the heart and not of the head. To attempt 
to prove the existence of God is like lighting a lantern to look 
for the sun; intellectual reasonings lead at best only to a 
"great, unintelligible Perhaps," which is almost worse than 
scepticism. But such a lack of speculative understanding is no 
real ground of complaint; the end of man is an Action, and 
not a Thought. The first duty of man, then, is insight into 
this underlying moral structure of the world. For Carlyle, 
this was the condemnation of the ruling philosophy of the 
day, — Benthamism, materialism, empiricism, imder whatever 
name it might pass. Instead of going from within outward, 
it was trying to start from the outer facts as if they were the 
realities; men had lost their faith in the invisible, and believed 
and hoped and worked only in the visible. "The scientist 
walks through the land of wonders unwondering, like a wise 
man through some huge, gaudy, imposing Vauxhall, whose fire- 
works, cascades, and symphonies the vulgar may enjoy and 
believe in, but where he finds nothing real but the saltpetre, 
pasteboard and catgut." The outcome is atheism and nega- 
tion, and negation is no proper attitude of the human spirit; 
belief is the healthy act of a man's mind, not doubt. It was 
God that said, Yes; it is the Devil that forever says, No. 

3. Carlyle's "moral idealism," as a protest alike against a 
mechanical philosophy of science, and the crudities of current 



210 English and American Philosophy 

superaaturalism, had a profound effect which has not yet 
entirely disappeared. But even in this brief statement" there 
are visible certain elements of weakness. There is a kind of 
intellectual activity whose value Carlyle never was able to 
appreciate. The mere attempt to think clearly without for 
the moment reference to the emotional bearings of our argu- 
ment, the critical analysis of ideas and beliefs whose outcome 
may seem only negative, the endeavor to bring our opinions 
calmly and without prejudice into comparison and discover 
what inconsistencies they may show, — this is an altogether 
necessary sort of work that some one has to do. But Carlyle 
was a prophet, not a logician; and to him nothing seemed 
worth while that could not instantly be called into service to 
enforce some moral lesson. A measure of justification may 
readily be found for him. It was inevitable that in a transition 
period the new interest in mechanism should be over-empha- 
sized, to the neglect of the motives and ends that make mechan- 
ism worth while; and Carlyle did well to recall the thoughts 
of men to a more positive basis. He is right in urging that 
the beginning and the end of conduct is belief — positive, spon- 
taneous, and in a sense unconscious of itself; "in all vital 
action Nature's manifest purpose and effect is, that it should 
go on for the most part below the surface, that like the peptic 
countryman we should never know that we have a system." 
But it does not follow that there is no pertinency to the attempt 
to understand the basis of the moral life, instead simply of 
reverencing it. The business of criticism, of speculation, is an 
interlude in life which marks a certain postponement. But 
it is not therefore an aberration to be deplored; it may well 
be a sign of progress rather, the result of increased resources 
which the old methods can no longer administer. To interpret 
the new science as mere unwisdom and disease is clearly to 
betray a dangerous blindness. The only outcome it leaves 
open is a return to pure instinct, with all its crudities, and 
uncertainty of hitting the mark. Thus in his theory of penal 



Thomas Carlyle 211 

law, for example, Carlyle frankly brushes aside the endeavor 
to rationalize and make efficient the dealing of society with 
its failures, and falls back upon a primitive vindictiveness as 
the one sound basis of punishment. Such a result indicates 
the defect of the whole attitude in morals. It may honestly 
believe itself a "fixed, irreconcilable, inexorable enmity to the 
enemies of God"; but it has no criterion for distinguishing, 
when the need arises, between the enemies of God and the 
enemies of Thomas Carlyle. And if one has not Carlyle's own 
fixed certainty that his first instinct is always right, he is 
left with no court of appeal. Actually, of course, the moral 
"facts" which Carlyle opposes to theory are after all nothing 
but his own interpretations, or theories, of the facts; and his 
strong disposition to suppose that a theory becomes a fact if 
only you reiterate it forcibly enough and decline to argue it, 
is not to be accepted without reserve. 

4. One outcome in particular of this mental attitude de- 
serves some special attention. Since genuine knowledge is for 
Carlyle immediate intuition or insight, he has no patience with 
complex programs of political reform, or with the theories 
on which they rest. To be sure, even Carlyle cannot get 
along without a program; but his method has the peculiarity 
that it tries to dispense with the apparatus of political specu- 
lation and argument. In other words his solution is: put 
matters into the hands of those God-inspired men who are 
not infected with the sceptical disease of the times, and they 
will settle everything for us — so the implication runs — through 
that native instinct for the right and the expedient which was 
the great advantage that earlier and more favored ages pos- 
sessed over our own. Insight and reverence are the beginning 
of wisdom — insight into whatever is an expression of the 
divine; and of all such expressions the highest is to be found 
in man. The hero, the man of preeminent worth, is thus the 
starting point for all social efficiency. On the other hand the 
hero, while he exists, is the rare exception; the mass of man- 



212 English and American Philosophy 

kind are "mostly fools." But if the masses cannot think and 
act for themselves, they can at least recognize their incapacity, 
can take to themselves leaders wiser than they, and so can 
be set upon the path which, left to themselves, they must have 
missed. There is no act more moral among men, Carlyle de- 
clares, than that of rule and obedience. Man is necessitated 
to obey superiors; he is a social being in virtue of this neces- 
sity. The most precious gift a man can offer is his appro- 
bation, his reverence to another man. The Liberal tendencies 
of his day seemed to him pointed therefore in the wrong di- 
rection. These emphasized popular control, the extension of 
the franchise, liberty, democracy; what men need, instead, is 
iron discipline. Everywhere the evils of liberty loom large 
in Carlyle's vision; the errors of a system of subordination 
and discipline are venial, which it is a mere sentimentalism to 
press. 

Such an ideal can hardly be accepted as having any self- 
evident and transparent claim. In conceiving of life as most 
profitably spent in "swallowing one's disgusts, and doing faith- 
fully the ugly commanded work" — a task for the value of 
which one has to trust his superiors, — Carlyle, for all his pro- 
fessed concern for the human soul, is really looking to the ex- 
ternal fact rather than the inner. "The vital point is not 
who decides," he writes, "but what is decided on." By no 
means; the vital point is to develop a race of men who are 
capable of deciding rightly. And since he is too much of a 
realist not to know that democracy is here to stay, for Carlyle 
in his later days the whole world has gone hopelessly wrong, 
and there is nothing to do but wrap himself in his prophet's 
mantle, and predict the dreadful evils that are to come of it, 
with slight expectation that his words will be heeded or do 
good. With all his certain confidence in the goodness and 
justice of things, to all practical intents he turns out a pessi- 
mist; whatever may be the conditions in the eternal world, so 



New England Transcendentalism 213 

far as the eye can look ahead in this actual world he sees every- 
thing going to the dogs. 

5. At the same time that Carlyle was preaching trans- 
cendentalism in England, a more general movement, drawing 
on somewhat similar sources of inspiration in spite of its con- 
nection with an individualism in the sharpest contrast with 
Carlyle's hero-worship, was having an interesting career in 
America. New England Transcendentalism is both a doctrine, 
and a life. It "denounces materialism in philosophy, formalism 
in religion, utilitarianism in personal and social ethics. It is 
a vindication of soul against sense, spirit against letter, faith 
against rite, heroism and nobleness against petty expediencies of 
the market." The central article of its creed is the autonomous 
and creative activity of the individual soul, which stands at the 
center of things as the source of all values and the touchstone 
of all truth. Self-culture therefore, in the largest sense, became 
the main business of the Transcendentalist. The ideal has 
its dangers, and these were not absent in the history of the 
movement. Even in Emerson, the profound reverence with 
which he approaches the sanctity of the inner self is a failure 
in perfect intellectual poise, due to too absolute a sense of the 
universal importance of that peculiar intellectual ferment 
through which New England happened to be passing, and al- 
most as naive at times as Jones Very's profession that he felt 
it an honor to wash his own face, being as it was the temple of 
the Spirit, But on the whole the movement was a healthy one. 
In spite of an obvious logic which tended to make the Tran- 
scendentalist draw back from practical reforms, his sympathies 
were on the side of righteous causes, more particularly when 
they stood for the enfranchising of the human spirit, and did 
not run to social or governmental machinery. Thus he was 
almost always to be found in the anti-slavery ranks, while the 
movement for the emancipation of women was a favorite with 
him. 



214 English and American Philosophy 

Of the figures prominent in the movement, that of Bronson 
Alcott is the most picturesque, as well as in some ways very 
typical. The center of his "system" appears to have been 
the doctrine of matter as the refuse, the residuum of Spirit, 
and the genesis of Nature through the lapse of personal beings 
from holiness ; and he makes much of an insight into the spine 
as the type of all Nature. More definite are the practical de- 
ductions from his idealism. Thus manuring is a base, cor- 
rupting, and unjust mode of forcing Nature. A distinction is 
made between vegetables which aspire or grow into the air, 
and the baser products which grow downward into the earth — 
potatoes, beets and radishes, — of which he would not allow 
the use. The canker worms, again, that infest the apple trees 
are not to be molested; they have the same right to the apples 
that man has. In spite of these idiosyncracies, however, Al- 
cott at his best must by all accounts have had something of 
a genius for conversation of a certain sort. This sort of 
conversation is indeed the issue to which Transcendentalism 
seems naturally to gravitate, and its character — of stimula- 
tion without precision — is symptomatic of the intellectual limi- 
tations of the movement. Another representative figure is 
that of Margaret Fuller, who embodies typically the craving 
for culture and intellectual distinction under conditions to 
which it is a little alien, and which lend it therefore a lively 
appreciation of its own virtue and rarity. 

6. It is Emerson, however, who gives the movement its 
chief significance, and in whom all its features of permanent 
value may be seen at their best. Emerson's method may not 
seem at first to lend itself to a straightforward presentation of 
his beliefs. It is seldom that he argues; he sees truth rather, 
and sets down what he sees as it comes to him. For consis- 
tency he professedly cares nothing; it is the "hobgoblin of little 
minds." Nevertheless this method of Emerson's is after all 
perhaps the best clue to his philosophy. For intuition, the flash 
of immediate insight into truth universal and divine, is not 



R. W. Emerson 21^ 

simply the one true way of knowledge; it is life itself, the 
only true kind of existence as well. Truth, eternal and neces- 
sary — this is God, reality, being. It follows that a true phi- 
losophy is bound to be idealistic. The Universe is the exter- 
nalization of the Soul. The earth and the heavenly bodies, 
physics and chemistry, which we sensually treat as if they were 
self-existent, are in truth only the retinue of our own being. 
Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought 
again, as ice becomes water and gas. "Every chemical change, 
every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth 
in the eye of the leaf to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal 
mine, every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, 
shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and 
echo the Ten Commandments." 

If one asks more precisely what is the relation of the indi- 
vidual person to this eternal Truth that constitutes the soul of 
the universe, the answer follows again from the nature of the 
experience in which truth is revealed. The immediate in- 
tuition of spiritual truth carries with it, as an experience, two 
distinctive characters; insight into truth is universal, and it is 
spontaneous. The truth experience overrides all particulars; 
and when a truth reveals itself to us, it commonly ap- 
pears to come, too, as a revelation. We cannot get it by 
striving, by willing, by agonizing, as we may particular facts 
of observation. Suddenly we find our minds illuminated; 
but how we came to see we cannot fully explain. These char- 
acters which truth reveals, Emerson interprets through his 
theory of an identity of the human soul with the World Soul. 
Man can understand truth because truth is in its essence 
everjrwhere one and the same. In the vision of spiritual mean- 
ing we do not simply know about reality; we are reality, we 
conjoin center with center. My insight is not my own private 
possession; it is the flowing through me of the great tide of 
Being. "Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed in 
the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism 



2i6 English and American Philosophy 

vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing, I 
see all; the currents of the universal being circulate through 
me; I am part and particle of God." 

The ethics which Emerson deduces from such a conception 
is first of all one of self-dependence. Speak your latent con- 
viction, and it shall be the universal sense. Imitation is sui- 
cide; what another announces I must find true in me, or wholly 
reject, and on his word or as his second, be he who he may, 
I can accept nothing. The only right is what is after my 
constitution, the only wrong is what is against it. So of every- 
thing that tends to limit us, and that keeps us from trusting 
to our own insight — creeds, parties, accepted ideals, teachers, 
books, our own past even. It is this that on the whole consti- 
tutes the most engaging aspect of Emerson's teaching, and 
lends to his pages their tonic quality. As the more positive 
supplement to this there is, again, the continual insistence on 
the potential infinity of the self, and the demand that we be 
ever going on to something new; the one great evil is to rest 
satisfied, and the only sin is limitation. It is one natural conse- 
quence of this strong individualistic emphasis, that Emerson 
should be inclined to depreciate the importance that modern 
times have assigned to humanitarian and social activities; 
"causes" represent an outer rather than an inner claim, and a 
man's first duty is to himself. 

7. For this last disposition there is, however, another reason 
also, which goes back again to Emerson's Platonism. "Expres- 
sion" is, to be sure, for Emerson essential; but expression is 
to be found not merely, or chiefly, in outer and practical 
changes. "That hankering after an overt and practical effect 
seems to me," he writes, "an apostasy. In good earnest, I 
am willing to spare this most unnecessary deal of doing. Life 
wears to me a visionary face. Hardest, roughest action is 
visionary also. People disparage knowing and the intellectual 
life, and urge doing. I am very content with knowing, if only 
I could know. I have not found that much was gained by 



R. W. Emerson 2.1J 

manipular attempts to realize the world of thought." Why in- 
deed should we be at such pains for this or that particular 
end, when presently the dream will scatter, and we shall burst 
into universal power? One cannot say indeed without reserve 
that Emerson neglects facts. He preaches a catholic acceptance 
of whatever comes to our net in experience; and he exalts the 
realized idea, the idea to which the world spirit has given 
actual expression, over the mere thought in our heads. But 
still it is for the sake of the law that the fact exists ; and given 
the law, it ceases to have any further significance. Nor do 
"facts" represent for Emerson primarily anything in the way of 
first-hand experience. They are reached through the intellect, 
and the intellect at work chiefly upon books and conversation; 
and it is the intellectual experience therefore that he really 
prizes. "I looked upon trades, politics, and domestic life," 
Emerson writes in the Journal, "as games to keep men amused, 
and hinder them from asking cui bono? until their eyes and 
minds are grown"; then they become superfluous. The prac- 
tical consequences are apparent; if the individual instance is 
so trivial alongside the principle of the thing, which already is 
realized in the eternal world, what seems to be the use of both- 
ering with little peddling changes and reforms? 

8. It is very hard to draw here in words a line that will 
hold in any strict way. "I know," writes Emerson, "against 
all appearances, that the universe can receive no detriment, 
that there is a remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for 
every goal"; and without some such ultimate faith life always 
runs the risk of being paralyzed. This buoyant and placid 
way of meeting life, which dwells upon the eternal nature of 
the good, and keeps the notion of harm and failure from the 
mind, has undoubtedly something to be said in its behalf, as 
is shown by its career — largely influenced by Emerson — in 
Christian Science and similar movements. Still there is a wide 
difference between saying that evil is not ultimate, — that it 
may be conquered, that is, by one who sets himself to do it, — 



2i8 English and Amej'ican Philosophy 

and saying that it is already overcome, that it simply is not, 
and so that we have no active duty toward it except to deny 
it. There is no crime to the intellect, Emerson writes. Sin 
seen from the thought is a diminution or less, seen from the 
conscience or will it is pravity or bad; and the implication is 
that the latter attitude is less fundamental than the former, 
and that the sufficient reminder therefore is not to try to better 
things, but merely to recognize that the good already is safe. 
"Misery is superficial, and the remedy, when it can be secured, 
of presenting to the mind universal Truth is a perfect- one." 
Logically this can only be intended to throw cold water upon 
our active endeavor to cast our own weight into the scale. 
To the will, evil must always be more than a negation; we 
do not fight with shadows, nor in the act of fighting can that 
which opposes us seem nothing but a shadow. 

There is another criticism also to which such a philosophy 
of optimism is exposed; on the intellectual side, it shows a de- 
fective appreciation of certain qualities of the real world. 
Granting that we ought to adopt an attitude of courage toward 
the world, there is no advantage in ignoring real difficulties, 
in refusing to admit our weaknesses, in talking as if in truth 
the will were unlimited and above all conditions. The simple 
answer is that the facts are not so; and if in order to spur 
on the spirit of self-reliance, and avoid spoiling the force 
of our exhortation, we talk as if they were so, we lay our- 
selves open to the risk that is always present when we shut 
our eyes to realities. Thus do all things, so Emerson in one 
form or another is constantly declaring, preach the indif- 
ferency of circumstances. But circumstances are not indiffer- 
ent, and it is no use pretending they are. Really everybody 
knows that there are limits, — though doubtless we ought not 
to be too hasty in setting these, — to anyone's power of con- 
trolling hostile circumstances; and that apart from favorable 
outward conditions to call forth our powers, they will remain 



R. W. Emerson 2ig 

in part at least unexpressed. Not everything can develop 
wholly from within, if indeed anything can. And if fate re- 
fuses favorable conditions, no amount of talk about the in- 
finity of man and the virtue of self-reliance can supply the 
lack. One may note in this connection Emerson's repugnance 
to tlie notion that bodily conditions limit the powers of the 
spirit, — passing in our own day into the doctrine of the suffi- 
ciency of mental treatment, — and his repudiation of the 
physician and the biologist. 

And this becomes most serious when it determines our atti- 
tude to other men. Here at least the readiness to sink the 
outer in the inner, and ignore the importance of favorable 
surroundings for the best development of the race, is not only 
to give up the possibility of any explanation of the pressing 
facts of man's actual life, but it is, through a dependence upon 
the sole method of the inspirational book or lecture, to put one- 
self out of sympathy with all less absolute attempts to do a 
little something toward righting the many wrong things that 
we find about us. Emerson's is one way, and within its sphere 
a useful one. But in turning it, against his own warning, — 
he speaks of the "over-faith of each man in the importance of 
what he has to do or say," — into a philosophy, and interpreting 
t^ universe after the image of his own private and special 
type of interest, he is taking a questionable path. That he 
is himself a "seeing eye rather than a helping hand" is a suffi- 
cient excuse for his plan of life ; but it does not forthwith justify 
the metaphysical judgment that to see is the end for which 
everything exists. This may possibly be; but it is at least 
a point against it if its logic seems to belittle the facts of our 
ordinary life and endeavor. For it is "only the finite that has 
wrought and suffered; the infinite lies sheltered in smiling 
repose." When a philosopher begins to talk about only the 
finite, it is well to be on one's guard. 



220 English and American Philosophy 

§ 2. T.H. Green 

1. It is of course only in certain rather elusive aspects that 
the thinking of Carlyle and Emerson, as of Coleridge in the 
earlier part of the century, can be brought into connection with 
the actual metaphysical apparatus of German Idealism to which 
attention has now to be directed. The first serious attempt, 
backed by an adequate knowledge of the literature in detail, 
to naturalize this philosophy in the English world, is Hutchin- 
son Stirling's Secret of Hegel. In Stirling, the religious and 
social interests which, in a staider form, were to supply the 
motive for the thinking of Green and most of his earlier dis- 
ciples, take the shape of a vivacious attack upon the spirit 
of the Aufklarung, — for Stirling personified more particularly 
in Mr. Buckle, — the theory of evolution, and the new po- 
litical economy with its glorification of individualism and 
laissez-faire; and he hails the philosophic vision of a rational 
whole of things — Hegel's "concrete universal" — as a powerful 
weapon for the overthrow of the materialism and self-will of 
an industrial society based on wealth, which had supplanted the 
better and saner culture of England in the past. Stirling's own 
style does not escape the obscurity of his German models, 
ultimate difficulties are only lightly touched upon by him, 
and more orthodoxy in religion is credited to Hegel than 
probably is justified; still in the large the book is an able 
anticipation of the change of spirit which was on the point 
of taking place in academic English philosophy. 

2. The most powerful single influence in securing to Abso- 
lute Idealism the position, which it continued to hold until 
into the twentieth century, of an almost official philosophy in 
England and America, is that of Thomas Hill Green; and 
its rapid success is in the first place due, as has been said, to 
the fact that it seemed to offer a profounder and more potent 
means of overthrowing the prevailing naturalistic creed than 



.T". H. Green 221 

was supplied by antagonists already in the field. The effort 
of British empiricism, — at least so Green interprets it, by 
identifying it with a single logical motive in particular, most 
prominent in Hume, — is to eliminate the work of "mind" from 
the world of knowledge, and reduce the object of knowledge to 
bare passive sensations. These the mind may proceed to 
deal with in the way of reproduction, combination, and ab- 
straction. But the sole reality continues to be the material of 
fleeting individual feelings; and the conceptions which seem 
to be implicated in our everyday notions of the world, — sub- 
stance, causality, and the like, — are illegitimate fictions which 
the mind imposes. The ideal of knowledge is, accordingly, to 
be found in the passive acceptance of what is forced upon us 
in feeling, denuded of the "relations" that come from the mind's 
own activity; for if these are fictions, then the more the intelli- 
gence works upon the material of sense the further from reality 
it carries us. The significance of Hume lies in the fact that by 
taking this ideal of method seriously, he brought to light its 
inevitable outcome — that knowledge, namely, is impossible. 
And the only way of escape is to turn our back upon it squarely, 
and recognize, with Kant, that the relational activity of the 
mind is involved in the very existence of a real world, so 
that without it reality is a meaningless term. The true method 
of philosophy is not to turn our eyes inward to an analysis of 
our subjective consciousness, — by this path we only throw 
doubt upon all knowledge alike; it is to examine reality itself 
as this forms the content of the knowledge we indubiiably 
possess, — in science, morality, art, rehgion, — and find out 
what its possession implies. 

And in this way, following Kant again, we discover that the 
possibility of knowledge depends upon the presence of a prin- 
ciple of unity, not identical with the succession of events, 
through which the flux of feeling is constructed into a real "ob- 
ject," and ultimately into a universe. The very meaning of 
"reality" carries the consequence that nothing in any sense 



222 English and American Philosophy 

is real for us which does not enter into this organized unity of 
a knowledge system. Once see this, and we are rid at one 
blow of two fetiches which empiricism has cherished — the 
notion of isolated sensations out of which an illusory world is 
built up by external association, and the notion of a reality 
beyond experience which is in its essence unknowable. Knowl- 
edge does not have its origin in mere feelings, because mere 
feelings are unthinkable and unreal; a feeling is at all only as 
it is this or that feeling in particular, and it cannot be some- 
thing in particular except as it is part of a definite relational 
context involving distinction from, and connection with, other 
particulars. The being of a thing is never adequately ex- 
pressed by saying. It is just itself and nothing else; for this 
would mean that it is inexpressible. Actually a sensation, in- 
stead of being the prius in the way of knowledge, is a relatively 
late product of analysis; it is something we discover as an 
element always in a larger whole. So an unknowable Absolute, 
again, is simply a contradiction in terms, since we presuppose 
that we can know it when we talk about it even as existing. 
The truth is that the relativity philosophers are looking in the 
wrong direction. The fault with an Absolute characterized as 
mere being of existence is not that we cannot know it; we can 
know ''being" perfectly, since there is nothing in the bare 
abstract character of being to know except just this character 
itself. The trouble is not with its unknowability, but with its 
abstractness. The true nature of reality is to be found, not 
by stripping off all its special features, but, rather, by remedy- 
ing its partialness and incompleteness, and making knowl- 
edge more and more concrete and all-embracing, until we have 
a fully rounded system in which every identical aspect of the 
real world is incorporated in its proper place. This concrete 
universal, this manifold in unity, is reality, or truth; and noth- 
ing isolated and barely particular, nothing outside the unitary 
system, has any being by itself. The empiricists, accordingly, 
ignore the one thing most essential and fundamental — the 



T. H. Green 223 

spiritual thread of unity which is necessary if we are to have 
reality at all. 

3. From the recognition of this spiritual fact of the unity 
of knowledge, as identified by Green with the unity of "self- 
consciousness," flow the significant consequences for religion 
and ethics in which he is primarily interested. The tendency 
of science had been to reduce man to a purely animal life in 
the midst of an indifferent universe, out of which the human 
race has been developed by an unintelligent process of natural 
selection. Now this may indeed be true of the physical organ- 
ism. But the real man, the essential self as an intelligent bearer 
of knowledge, cannot possibly be a creature of the natural 
world for this simple reason, that there would be no natural 
world were not the spiritual principle of self-consciousness al- 
ready presupposed. The world is real only for knowledge; and 
that which is necessary to constitute a world cannot therefore 
be the passive product of this world. The unity of phenomena 
cannot be one of the phenomena unified; the consciousness of 
combination is not a combined consciousness. We can know a 
temporal series of facts as a series only as the facts are held 
together through something present alike to each of them, and 
itself, consequently, out of time; and such a timeless principle 
can never be a result of the process of change. Since there- 
fore man has it in him to know phenomena, he is necessarily 
not himself a phenomenon; the true self, as is shown by the 
very possibility of scientific knowledge, is something immaterial 
and immovable, neither in time nor in space, eternally one with 
itself. However, it is not of course the empirical self, the 
mere private individual, which thus exists outside of the time 
process and of the natural order that belongs to time. The 
empirical self is just one item in the natural world, — not an 
isolated item, since there is nothing isolated, but a minor por- 
tion of the total universe; it is not the knower, therefore, but 
an object of knowledge, a part of the knowledge content. The 
true self or knower is, again, that principle of universality, — 



224 English and American Philosophy 

timeless because the unity which alone makes a succession of 
events possible cannot itself be one successive moment among 
others, — by virtue of which reality is brought within a compre- 
hensive system. 

And it follows that, since nothing can be real for knowledge 
except as it comes within this unified whole, there can be but 
one Self — the universal Consciousness, or God; God is the 
necessary postulate which knowledge requires if it is to have 
any validity or truth. Green's argument is, to repeat, that 
reality has no meaning apart from a unity of knowledge; and 
such a unifying principle we nowhere find except in self-con- 
sciousness. But since it is clear that self-consciousness in 
its mere private capacity does not make reality, and that a 
world already constituted by thought exists prior to our in- 
dividual acquaintance with it, we must suppose that our true 
self, which alone explains how knowledge for us is possible, 
is identical with that eternally existing Self which religion calls 
God. God is thus no Other over against whom man stands 
in a relation of externality, and whom he knows indirectly and 
inferentially. That would be to make God himself an object, 
and not the constitutive source on which all objects alike de- 
pend. The very principle of knowledge in us which consti- 
tutes our essential nature is God's nature Hkewise; in knowl- 
edge, man participates in the actual life of God. Meanwhile 
the particular human self is a compound of the finite and the 
infinite; it is an animal organism used as the vehicle of an 
eternally complete consciousness. But even our human knowl- 
edge, again, is not oj a reality different from itself; reality is 
the same wherever it appears. Our knowledge is the revelation 
of actually existing ideas, through which possibilities of them 
in us are gradually actualized; God is the realization of the 
possibilities of man. 

4. This incompleteness of man's life, when taken in con- 
nection with its potential infinity, Green turns to account in 
his theory of the ethical experience. As sensation is merely an 



T. H. Green 225 

animal function, and does not become an element in knowledge 
until it is taken up into the unity of the self, so desire has as 
such no ethical significance, and enters into moral conduct 
only as it, too, is related to the self, and becomes a form of 
self-realization. An animal want or instinct is nothing but 
a blind propulsion; before it represents a conscious desire 
or motive, it must become the presentation of a wanted object. 
But an object, it has appeared, involves the work of that uni- 
versal spiritual principle which is not an aspect of the "natural" 
life at all. And if conscious motives, since they involve the 
activity of spirit, are thus not of natural origin — are not 
phenomena, — the human will must be regarded as a timeless 
act, and, therefore, free, since that which makes temporal 
succession possible cannot itself be determined by any event in 
time. The ethical end, accordingly, is not to be identified with 
pleasure; mere pleasure, indeed, as a separate bit of feeling, 
has already been shown to have no reality at all. The true 
end can only be found in the satisfaction of that spiritual self 
which it is impossible should be realized in any isolated event 
in time, or any number of such events; it is a satisfaction "on 
the whole," a permanent well-being that consists in the full 
realization of human powers, and that does not pass away there- 
fore with this or that transitory feeling. Man does not live 
for pleasure, but for the realization of his capacities as a uni- 
fied and spiritual self. 

There is another consequence of this conception of the good 
as the realization of a non-natural or spiritual principle which 
constitutes the true self; it implies that man is not a separate 
individual, but a member of a spiritual community, attaining 
his good only in connection with the lives of his fellows, whose 
self-realization is included in his own. Moral growth consists 
in the progressive discovery that the things which, in nature, 
and our fellow men, and the institutions of society, at first 
had seemed an external hindrance to the freedom of the in- 
dividual's self-assertion, are in reality themselves a means 



226 English and American Philosophy 

to his development; their appropriation extends indefinitely 
the boundaries of the self, until in the end we come to see that 
nothing whatever is alien to the true inner life. And this 
brings us back to religion. For the idea which governs this 
process of self-realization is the complete attainment of that 
identity with the universal Self which is implicit in the fact 
of knowledge. It is true that what God's nature is, we cannot 
know beyond its very partial revelation up to date in the ex- 
isting spiritual products of human history; and so the ideal 
seems to be lacking in concrete directions for our guidance. 
But at least it tells us that we have not yet attained; and in 
this recognition of an eternal "more," and the pressure which 
it puts upon us, we have the source of all moral progress. 

5. In turning now to a consideration of Green's idealism, a 
possible ambiguity needs first to be pointed out in connection 
with the nature of his eternal principle. There are two inter- 
pretations of the "unity of consciousness" which, though con- 
nected, are not identical. The first and perhaps most natural 
way to understand the phrase would be in terms of the psy- 
chological unity of that stream of conscious experiencing which 
constitutes what we know as the inner life of an empirical self. 
It is beyond question that I, as a particular person who thinks 
and feels and acts in the midst of a world of physical processes 
and of other persons, do find the various contents of my life 
held together in some fashion as a whole; there is a realization 
of unity, more or less complete, running through the succession 
of the fleeting states of my being. In this meaning, then, the 
principle would represent a psychological fact, empirically dis- 
coverable, which helps to characterize that particular portion 
of reality which I call a human consciousness. 

But there is also another meaning that might be given to the 
principle. It is possible to speak intelligibly of "consciousness" 
when I intend to refer thus to the immediate inner facts of life 
that come home to me in feeling or direct awareness, — in this 
sense my private conscious life has a unity of a special or psy- 



T. H. Green 227 

chological sort that does not include the other things and selves 
that lie beyond its range; or I may, again, call these external 
things themselves the objects of consciousness, in so far as my 
experience brings me into any sort of cognitive contact with 
them. In this second meaning, not my empirical self merely, 
but the whole range of known realities, enters into the unity 
of consciousness or experience. 

To avoid this ambiguity it will be better, and at least equally 
natural, to call the latter unity always the unity of knowledge, 
rather than the unity of the self, or of self-consciousness. 
Meanwhile it is the second of the two standpoints that bulks 
very much the larger in Green's exposition. This alone lends 
itself directly to the belief in an eternal consciousness that 
embraces all reality; the mere recognition of the unity of my 
life palpably falls short of such an outcome. And accordingly 
the first and least ambiguous formulation of the idealistic thesis 
will be, not that reality is intelligence, or a rational self, but 
that it is intelligible, or rational — is capable, that is, of being 
known, and known as in some sense a unified and related whole. 
My self, from which the notion of "self-consciousness" is of 
course derived, we may indeed turn to for a possible clue to 
the nature of this knowledge unity. But taken as it stands, 
and apart from the ambiguous identification of the two mean- 
ings of the word, it gives us not my self, but my knowledge, 
as that which first suggests itself as an interpretative concept; 
and we are getting ahead of the argument if we take for 
granted, either that the unity of a knowledge content consti- 
tutes the unity of the self, or that it could not exist in the 
absence of a self. The fact from which we start is the fact that 
nothing is real for knowledge except in terms of rational rela- 
tionships within some more comprehensive unity of system; 
what the status of this system is we have still to inquire. 

6. And now this suggests an intelligible meaning that might 
attach to what the idealist has to say about the identification 
of reality with knowledge or intelligence, without making it 



228 English and American Philosophy 

necessary to give up our ordinary realistic prejudices, or to 
commit ourselves to a special metaphysics. There clearly is 
a sense in which knowledge, or science, may be regarded as 
coextensive with reality, or at least with reality in so far as it 
possesses any possible interest for man; but what sense? Evi- 
dently this in the first instance, that knowledge in some fashion 
or other is able to describe reality, by translating into the 
medium of terms and propositions its abstract qualities, laws, 
and characteristics generally. In speaking of these characters 
as abstract, a word of caution may be necessary. It is a sound 
contention of the idealists that significant knowledge is not 
abstract in the sense which involves the progressive dropping 
out of the specific features of existence. There is every rea- 
son to agree that the ideal of knowledge is a systematic whole 
in which all possible aspects of the world take their place. But 
in granting this we still, unless we arbitrarily abandon the 
natural point of view, and beg the whole philosophical ques- 
tion, are dealing only with a matter of logical content. It is 
clear that everyday thinking, whatever its readiness to assume 
that reality is intelligible, and that our knowledge is a perfectly 
good account of the real facts, is not under the slightest tempta- 
tion to suppose that scientific or philosophical knowledge as 
such is the universe. It is a scheme of relationships abstracted 
from their presence in the existing world, and held precipitated 
in an ideal realm of human thought. And if we are to ap- 
prove our philosophical opinions to the common-sense man who 
dwells in tHe breast of each of us, we are bound to recognize 
that the logical description which forms the content of knowl- 
edge is the description of a world which has a real existence 
not resolvable into merely descriptive terms, and which, there- 
fore, though it is intelligible, is not itself thought or knowledge 
in the ordinary sense of the words. While it has a nature to 
which thought may attain, it is not a bare "nature" and noth- 
ing more, inhabiting a bodiless realm of timeless self-identity; 
it is an active, full-blooded world of real objects, producing 



T. H. Green 229 

real effects in time. The scientist's formula may sum up ade- 
quately the character of the physical or the chemical fact; but 
it is not capable of acting as a substitute in the world of events 
for real physical and chemical forces. 

It will be possible, then, to assign a meaning to much that 
Green has to say, without abandoning more familiar ways of 
thinking, if we translate his statements about reality into logical 
terms, and think, not of what we ordinarily mean when we talk 
of the existing universe, but of that comprehensive scheme 
of relationships, of ideal intellectual content divorced from 
existence, by which scientific thinking endeavors to set forth 
the character of the objects with which in our practical life 
we come into contact. But the very possibility of making 
in our thought this contrast, is a strong reason against suppos- 
ing too readily that such a knowledge system is identically 
reality itself, and that no further question about the relation 
between reality and knowledge need arise to bother the phi- 
losopher. And if it should appear that the identification in- 
volves the confusing of real distinctions of thought, or that 
it slurs over the existence of important facts of experience for 
which it finds no natural explanation, it will need to show very 
unusual merits of its own to offset this. 

7. The gist of Green's argument, to repeat, is this, that the 
unity of knowledge is unintelligible apart from the presence of 
a single timeless spiritual principle which constitutes alike the 
reality of the self, and of the universe. So long as we keep 
solely to the acknowledged fact that knowledge is, or tends to 
be, a unified and related intellectual content, this is to go 
considerably beyond what at first sight is implied in our datum. 
All sorts of philosophies have held that reality can be thought 
intelligibly as a whole, materialistic as well as spiritualistic. 
All that the logical postulate by itself demands is, that there 
should be relations binding things together, and that these 
relations should be capable of being thought, — not that they 
should have their sole existence within a unitary mind. When 



230 English and American Philosophy 

all has been said about the objectivity of relations, why might 
it not be possible that our ordinary view is justified in sup- 
posing that the mind can think that which is not itself a 
thought? why may not relations be real outside of a mind, 
and yet be thinkable? The fact may not be so; but it does 
not appear inherently absurd. There is no immediate self- 
evidence in the judgment that because an influence passes from 
the sun to vegetation, or because spring follows winter and 
precedes summer, these groups of facts must of necessity have 
their sole being in the unity of a divine mind. If the idealistic 
thesis is to be maintained, it at least will call for more extended 
argument. 

The simplest line of reasoning that might be followed here 
would run something as follows: Since knowing is a mental 
act, and since, for purposes of thinking, relations have there- 
fore to be brought "within the mind," we can be sure they 
are not without an affinity of some sort with the mental ; and so 
we may reasonably use this fact to interpret their standing in 
the outer world, and may conjecture that there also they have 
their reality in the same mental form. This however hardly 
represents the natural type of argument that Green's thesis 
calls for. At best it leaves a dualism between the idea in our 
mind and its embodiment in a more ultimate mind, which 
idealism wishes to avoid; and since the conclusion is only an 
inferential interpretation of a reality beyond our thought, it 
gives merely a conjectural and analogical proof where idealism 
demands certainty. The real point of Green's position is, that 
in knowledge we have the veritable presence of reality itself, 
and no reference to a "beyond" in terms of finite thinking; 
has he actually rendered such a thesis probable? 

8. The proof on which Green ultimately relies for this is 
implied rather than clearly stated; and it is valid only as we 
already take for granted the assumption that has been attribu- 
ted to him — that reality is nothing but a knowledge system. 



T. H. Green 231 

From this it follows that we have only to point to an identity of 
logical content between man's knowledge and God's to break 
down at once any separation between the two. This assump- 
tion, however, is of course just what our more familiar habits 
of thought refuse to entertain. We have knowledge — this is 
not denied ; and the content of knowledge is a timeless system, 
identical with itself under all conditions. But it is timeless only 
because for our intellectual purposes we have taken it out of 
the flux of events in time, and have translated everything into 
ideal terms of logical content where time itself now exists only 
as a timeless set of relationships. There is no doubt of our 
ability to do this; the question is whether in the result reality 
still is present in all its fulness. 

9. In order to deal with Green's answer, it will be necessary 
now to introduce again that notion of the "self" which has 
been temporarily ignored. No logical compulsion seems to call 
for this. A knowledge system possesses unity. But why should 
this unity be set off in any degree from the complex of rela- 
tionships that enter into a unity? why is not unity itself only 
one aspect in the related system? Where do we get the right, 
that is, to talk of a spiritual principle, an active agent, which 
superinduces itself upon the relations and brings them into a 
whole, and which cannot itself be conditioned by any of the 
relations that result from its "combining and unifying action"? 
The chief motive for this in Green's case will be found in his 
ethical and religious interests; but also perhaps it is explain- 
able through the difficulty we have in maintaining ourselves 
in the high altitude of pure knowledge content, to which the 
thesis so far confines us. We cannot altogether forget that 
knowledge also is for man an event in a personal history, a 
function of a temporal succession; and because reality ap- 
parently is in time, we turn to an "active" principle, an "agent," 
to change it from appearance to reality. In any case the unity 
of the empirical self, with its suggestion of the particular and 



232 English and American Philosophy 

the temporal, does actually serve for Green in this way as a 
mediating term between the chaos of mere feelings, and the 
timeless unity of pure knowledge. 

But the remedy will work only when we confuse, once more, 
the temporal unity of the process of experience with the time- 
less unity of a knowledge content; and in the degree in which 
Green insists upon the timelessness of the self as well, all 
connection with a temporal world vanishes again. Nothing in 
the argument for a timeless self is relevant to the peculiar 
character of that felt continuity of experience to which the 
empirical self is tied ; the reasoning gets its force entirely from 
the refusal to recognize any difference between the logical and 
the existential or psychological fact. Logically it is true that in 
the idea of succession there is no temporal separation of ante- 
cedent and consequent; both are held together in an indivisible 
and non-temporal unity. But in the feeling of succession, 
which enters into an actual human experience, this is not 
so evidently the case. Somehow or other, to be sure, experi- 
ence is capable of being felt as continuous, and is not a string 
of bare disjointed states; this is a fundamental fact which 
the possibility of rational experience presupposes. But it does 
not follow that the life which is thus bound together is taken 
out of time. On the contrary, the whole meaning of the felt 
relation is a temporal one, and "before" and "after" are no 
mere logical distinctions, but actual characters in the real world. 
For if the very fact that our human experience is unified, — 
the fact, in short, that we have experience, — is enough to 
take it out of time, it is impossible to understand how even the 
illusion of time could have arisen. If a temporal series were 
not unified. Green argues, we could not know it as a series. 
But neither could we know it as a series if, with the introduc- 
tion of unity, it straightway ceased to be a series. I cannot 
indeed know two things as before and after, except as the 
related terms are both timelessly implicated in a unity of 
thought; but if the things to which the relations attach are 



T. H. Green 22^1^ 

not really in temporal succession, then my thought falsifies 
them. 

Green's argument depends, then, on the refusal to see any 
distinction between the experienced unity of a human life, and 
the logical unity of a system of thought, — a unity indeed out 
of time, but out of time because it is logical, and not because 
it is unified. Everywhere he presupposes that unless we fall 
back on the timeless unity of logical content, we are forced to 
the alternative of a meaningless chaos of unrelated feelings. 
But it is not evident why there may not be, as there appears 
to be, a more immediate experience of unity which is not time- 
less, but itself identical with a portion of the time process. 
Indeed we might seem bound to presuppose some immediate ex- 
perience of time before the thought of time could have any 
content. And it is in harmony with all our mental prepos- 
sessions to regard the unity of the empirical self as such a 
temporal fact, felt as stretching out over an actual temporal 
span, and having, as a whole, its beginning and its ending. 
And Green's argument seems always to miss this possibility. 
The content of a consciousness of a sensible event, he urges, 
is not itself a sensible event. Now the logical content in terms 
of which we know a past sensible event is not indeed a sensi- 
ble event; and also the immediate experience of a sensible event 
is not a "mere" unrelated feeling. But surely there is some 
interpretation in which everyone would acknowledge that it is 
an "event," and an event that cannot be disconnected from 
sensation. Even an act of knowledge comes into being and 
passes away again; and no appeal to the abstract descriptive 
content which it makes use of for the purposes of knowing can 
alter this. What Green is really doing here in order to get a 
timeless self, is to h5rpostasize consciousness, and then to argue 
that between this consciousness of succession and its elements 
there can be no temporal relationship, since it is present to all 
of them alike. But the experience of succession is not an 
h5rpostasized spiritual principle, but simply what it claims to 



234 English and American Philosophy 

be — time-revealing experience; and with reference to its com- 
ponents it does not need to have a temporal relation, because 
it is their temporal relationship. And it still remains tem- 
porally related also to a wider context. This wider relation 
can indeed only be apprehended by us through the medium of 
a timeless knowledge content ; but this takes it out of time only 
in case, once more, we beg the question at the start, and identify 
reality with the abstract content in terms of which it is known. 

10. Now if we feel ourselves constrained to accept at all the 
notion of a self which is neither God, nor a chaos of unrelated 
feelings, but which, existing in time as a particular portion of 
reality whose acts of knowing are in every case particular 
events, is yet really competent to pass, through knowledge, be- 
yond its limited existence, and to grasp the ideal content of a 
larger world, it brings back inevitably the problems that Ideal- 
ism congratulates itself on avoiding. If reality itself is noth- 
ing but a descriptive content which constitutes a rational or 
logical system, a human self, and the fact that it perceives or 
knows, will of course enter into this descriptive system qnly 
in the way that anything else may do. But if there is such a 
thing as "existence," which logic does not fully compass, the 
matter is more complicated. In that case we have not merely 
to place the thought of a human self in the thought of the 
wider context of the universe; we have to relate the same sys- 
tem twice over in different forms, once as the actual universe 
in its known character, and once as the thought of an insignifi- 
cant human person occupying a particular place in time. And 
then knowledge, in its human sense, ceases to be the object, 
and becomes again a knowledge oj the object, separated from 
it in point of existential being. 

Green has in general three ways of dealing with this situa- 
tion, which is the crux of his peculiar philosophical point of 
view. Most frequently, he simply ignores the human aspect, 
and concerns himself solely with knowledge as logical content, 
without asking what its being known by its implies. This atti- 



T. H. Green 235 

tude he backs up on occasion by specific arguments to show 
why there can be no further question, and why the supposed 
distinction between thought and reahty, knowledge and thing 
known, self and object, is logically meaningless. And, finally, 
he proceeds to admit the essential fact in dispute, while covering 
up nevertheless the extent of his admission so that he is able 
to persuade himself that it has not been made. 

II. Green's reason for holding that the distinction between 
thought and reality is untenable is roughly this: To talk of 
anything as outside human experience is ipso facto to bring it 
within human experience, and confess that it is not external and 
independent after all; things-in- themselves are in the nature 
of the case unknown and unknowable, and so entirely without 
meaning to us. The very use of the term "external" defeats 
our purpose. We are not entitled to say that anything is out- 
side of consciousness, for externality, as a relation, exists only 
in the medium of consciousness; it is one of the relations by 
which consciousness connects its objects, and so cannot relate 
consciousness mith its objects. To say, again, that an outside 
world "acts" upon our minds, is the same as saying that a 
world which exists only by the activity of our minds is the 
cause of that activity. Similarly on the side of the self ; it can- 
not be, as the dualist implies, the empirical self which is the 
subject in knowledge, because the empirical self is knowable, 
and so is an "object" which itself implies a more ultimate sub- 
ject. The true distinction between the consciousness of the 
finite individual, and what really exists, is not that between 
consciousness and its opposite, but between a more and a less 
complete consciousness. And to this logical argument there 
may be added a more practical sort of consideration. Is it 
not so that growth in wisdom consists in the discovery that 
man lives not in an alien universe, but in one that lends itself 
to appropriation by him for his own enlargement, and that 
the revelation of the true significance of the individual in- 
volves, therefore, the continual transcendence of his private 



236 English and American Philosophy 

personality? And this offers another way in which to put the 
absurdity of realism; if it is urged that knowledge is always 
the property of some private individual, the answer is that such 
an isolated individual is itself a pure fiction. 

All these considerations without exception get their force 
only when the question in dispute is prejudged. They can be 
given a perfectly good meaning // what we are talking about 
is the ideal content which descriptively we apply to reality, 
abstracted from the occurrence of knowing as an incident in a 
finite life; but they lose their controversial force the moment 
it is admitted as conceivable that the ideal content of human 
knowledge, and reality, may be distinguished. "External" is 
indeed perhaps not the best word to describe the relationship 
intended; it suggests too strongly a spatial character. All 
that is meant, however, is that objects may have a sort of ex- 
istence, not unrelated to, but nevertheless quite distinguish- 
able from, the psychical event — and all our thoughts are 
psychical events whatever else they may be — in which we 
apprehend their ideal nature; and this is not prejudicial in 
the least to the further claim that, as a logical character, every 
predicate that we can ascribe to reality, including the relation 
of externality itself, must, to be grasped in thought, be brought 
within a knowledge content. And it is incompetent to ap- 
peal to the absurdity of a thing-in-itself, because what is 
meant by a thing-in-itself is, not mere being that possesses 
no specific character, — which is what the idealist commonly 
insists that it must mean, — but being that has just the char- 
acter that thought assigns to it, while nevertheless embodying 
this character on a different plane of existence from that which 
is involved in the act of human thinking. So again one need 
not deny the evident fact that in some real fashion the human 
self is not isolated, but finds its life in connection with the 
world about it. But if thought can bring us into relation 
to a reality which exists beyond the self who thinks it, this 
will mean, simply, not that my expanding life absorbs in a 



T. H. Green 237 

literal sense the world of things and other selves, but only that 
it needs these conscious relationships to the world, mediated 
through knowledge, to supply its cognitive content and its 
value. 

12. Now since, in talking of anything whatever, we neces- 
sarily put it in descriptive terms, every statement alike can 
get an interpretation, without going beyond the realm of 
logic; and there seems no compulsion that can force a phi- 
losopher against his will to look further for its meaning. The 
very objection that "existence" ought to be taken account of as 
well as logical content, can be turned if we insist that existence, 
too, is only a category of thought, and has no sense, therefore, 
other than is given by its place within a logical system. Per- 
haps only when we cease to be thinkers, and turn to life itself, 
does the pallid emptiness of a universe reduced to logical rela- 
tions come fully home to us. But as a matter of theory, also. 
Green is constantly running up against certain aspects of the 
world very hard to reconcile with a thoroughgoing identity of 
thought and reality ; and at the risk of repetition, these deserve 
some further attention. 

Since knowledge is bound to mean our knowledge to begin 
with, and since there are reasons why the idealist wishes to 
postpone questions about the nature of the "knower," it will 
not be surprising if he often gives the impression that the 
thought on which objects are dependent, the thought which 
makes the world, is our finite human thought. Numerous pas- 
sages might be quoted in which this seems to be said in so 
many words. But such a claim would of course misinterpret 
Green's real opinion; there are certain points about knowledge 
which, he clearly recognizes, negative such an interpretation. 
Although he has found it easy to discredit the "external" re- 
lation of thought to its object, there is another aspect of 
thought which no sober philosopher can possibly overlook, 
and that is the incompleteness of whatever knowledge human 
beings an3rwhere posssess. Green has no intention of main- 



238 English and American Philosophy 

taining the identity between this incomplete thought and 
reality; indeed in his ethics, in particular, he lays a good 
deal of stress upon the feebleness of our understanding at its 
best, and our necessary ignorance of reality in anything like 
its fulness. Accordingly the explanation keeps recurring that 
it is not finite thought that makes the world; the thought that 
constitutes objects is an eternally complete thought, which yet 
by its presence as a spiritual principle in us renders our in- 
complete knowledge possible. 

One sense that might attach to this has already been dis- 
counted. The claim that our thought truly knows the real 
world would be disallowed, were it not so that the characters 
which it attributes to the world are the very same characters 
that really belong there. What however the dispute turns on 
is the further question whether this identity of abstract logical 
content is enough to constitute an identity of the two selves, or 
the two systems, as concrete facts of existence. If reality is 
nothing but logical content, it has been seen that the answer 
is inevitable. A logical fact is identical with itself wherever 
it may be found; and accordingly in so far as my thought 
reproduces the divine consciousness, it is the divine conscious- 
ness. 

But now if the self in the two cases is identically the same 
self, why should there be, or appear to be, two systems, one in- 
complete, the other perfect? Either they are literally one, and 
then no question of duality ever could have arisen; or else, if 
the self that is present in both of them is one, but the systems 
themselves are capable of being distinguished, the difference 
must be due to some outstanding feature alien to the one 
spiritual principle. Green evades the difficulty by an appeal to 
our ignorance. He would have us refrain from asking why 
a perfect consciousness should thus go on to make innumerable 
imperfect copies of itself; we are, he says, not called upon to 
explain why reality is what it is. It might perhaps be thought 
that a philosophy whose whole aim is to substitute rational sig- 



T. H. Green 239 

nificance for bare fact, is under an obligation to suggest some 
meaning for a central aspect of its world, so apparently with- 
out point; but at any rate this is scarcely the issue. It is a 
question primarily not of fact, but of logical consistency. And 
Green finds it impossible to express himself without implying 
constantly the dualism he is logically bound to avoid. Thus 
when he speaks for example of the source of the external re- 
lations, and the source of our knowledge of them, as one and 
the same, the distinction which he excludes from the "source" 
breads out again at once in connection with its effects, and 
"our" knowledge separates from the system known. The 
character, then, which most indubitably attaches to human 
knowledge — its finiteness and incompleteness — opens up a 
gap between thought and reality that cannot be bridged by 
the mere assertion that they have a certain measure — but only 
a measure — of logical identity. Green accepts the finite at its 
face value as a "partial phase of the whole viewed in its isola- 
tion"; it does not seem to have occurred to him to ask the 
question. Viewed by whom, or what? For while a part may 
be a part, it needs some ingenuity to explain how it can get 
"viewed" in an isolation which, if the sole real point of view 
is that of the eternal self, has been shown to be a term without 
meaning. 

13. A closely related difficulty has to do with the temporal 
character of finite human experience, including the experience 
of knowing. It has appeared that the moment an object be- 
comes intelligible, it is taken out of time, and that the real self 
which does the knowing is also timeless; how then does the ap- 
pearance of time arise? If the knowing self were different from 
the eternal self, one might perhaps be eternal, and the other 
temporal ; but how can the same self be at once eternally time- 
less, and a development in time? And yet, by an unavoidable 
prejudice of our minds, the empirical self does seem to be a 
temporal fact; and if our incomplete knowledge is the reproduc- 
tion of a timeless reality, at least it is a progressive reproduc- 



240 English and American Philosophy 

tion. Green is so intent on saving the timelessness of knowl- 
edge, that he tends to lose sight of the main difficulty here. 
What, he asks, does the fact that we pass through a succession 
of mental states of consciousness mean? Not that knowledge 
is an event. The only event is the mental event of arriving 
at an apprehension of the related facts; and the event of pass- 
ing into a state of consciousness is not that which makes it 
what it is as a state of consciousness. This last is, once more, 
the presence of a spiritual principle through which relations are 
brought together into a unity that excludes succession. But 
such a method of showing that knowledge is timeless depends, 
not on getting rid of time, but on locating it elsewhere in the 
event of arriving at knowledge. And how the timeless whole 
is capable of taking up a finite self whose partial character is 
only explainable through the conception of events in time, still 
remains unanswered. 

14. It is in connection with one further aspect of the situ- 
ation that Green's conclusions about the finite and the temporal 
seem at times on the point of crystallizing. It has appeared 
that his argument starts out from an attack on English sensa- 
tionalism, in the interest of relations. Now there is no ap- 
parent need why an analysis of experience should not recognize 
the presence both of sensations and of relations between them; 
but in Green's case there are various motives not favorable to 
this. If we are right in supposing that the central element in 
his notion of reality is that logical framework into which, for 
human knowledge, the world ideally falls, then sensation in 
so far is not a logical fact. It is an existence, concrete, par- 
ticular, localized in time. A relation it is easy and natural to 
think of as a universal and timeless fact; but not so a sensa- 
tion. From another angle, too, it is hard for our everyday 
thought to get away from the belief that sensation implies an 
outside source or occasion. Thus even Kant had tended to 
think of experience as compounded of two elements, sensation 
and thought, the one of which has its origin from without, and 



T. H. Green 241 

the other from the mind itself; it is this feature of Kant which 
Green and all his school are most anxious to correct. But 
then what is the place of sensation, or feeling, in the rela- 
tional whole? 

The easiest reply would be, logically, that sensation has no 
existence at all as distinct from relations; and there is ground 
for thinking that this is what Green in certain moods would 
like very much to be able to say. He does not say it quite 
unambiguously; and at times he says the opposite. Green 
is well aware of the barrenness, for religion and ethics at any 
rate, of an eternal self which has no place, along with thought, 
for will and feeling; and he makes this an objection against 
Caird's version of idealism. He even talks of feeling and 
thought as inseparable and mutually dependent, each in its 
full reality including the other.^ But the more specific his 
arguments become, the more they make it evident that his real 
metaphysical interest lies on one side of this thesis only — 
that the reality of feeling includes relations; and his method 
of showing this leaves it uncertain to what extent, on the other 
hand, relation can be said even to imply feelings. By preemp- 
ting the word "reality," to begin with, for the intellectual way 
in which we distinguish, not the real from the unreal, but the 
real from what merely seems to be, — by identifying it, that 
is, with a purely logical function, — he is able to show that only 
in terms of relationships can this test be applied; the question 
about the reality of anything has to do solely with the ques- 
tion whether it is what it is taken to be, — that is, whether it 
is related as it seems to be related.^ Accordingly the reality of 
feeling, also, has meaning only through its reference to a 
permanent order of nature; and this unalterableness does not 
belong to simple feelings by themselves, but to the relations 
which they have to their conditions, or to other feelings. The 
same sort of consideration applies to the particularity of feel- 
ing ; a particular feeling is, again, a feeling related in a certain 
^Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 50. ^ Ibid., Sec. 12. 



242 English and American Philosophy 

way. Now this as it stands might seem to presuppose that 
feelings must at any rate first be felt before they can be placed 
even in a mistaken context; but its logic nevertheless points 
to a conclusion of a more radical sort. For if the sole mean- 
ing that attaches to the reality of anything is that it has a place 
in an objective order, nothing is left to the claim that the feel- 
ing is real as felt] and consequently by itself it cannot be said 
to be anything at all, and the entire nature which sensations 
have in experience belongs to them in virtue of their relations.^ 
This conclusion Green himself seems ready at times to draw 
more or less explicitly. When we say that the reality of a 
feeling is in its relationships, we are saying that feeling as 
such is not real; for a relation between feelings is not itself 
felt. Or, still more subtly, let us grant that there undoubtedly 
is something in experience other than thought; feeling is 
other than thought. It is its otherness to thought that makes 
feeling what it is. But that is saying, then, that relation to 
thought makes it what it is, so that it is nothing but a relation- 
ship after all.^ The same sort of argument has already been 
seen to apply to the temporal character that is supposed to 
give individuality to feeling. Whatever feeling as such may be, 
the reality of the occurrence of feeling is not feeling, but the 
jact that it is felt; and the "fact that" is a non-temporal and 
relational fact, which does not itself pass away. For knowl- 
edge, then, sensible qualities are not sensations, but consist 
either in possibilities of producing sensations, or in the facts 
that such and such sensations are being produced; ^ and there 
is no reason to suppose that to their timeless conditions must 
be added something further in the way of feltness, since for 
the only sort of consciousness for which reality exists, the con- 
ceived conditions are the reality.* It may be conjectured that 
the common notion that an event in the way of sensation is 
something sui generis, is probably a mistake of ours arising 

*Cf. Works, Vol. I, p. 378. ^Vol. I, p. 417. 

=■¥01. II, p. 181. "Vol. II, p. 191. 



T. H. Green 243 

from the fact that we feel before we know what the reality 
of the feeling is, and hence continue to fancy that the feeling 
is something apart from its timeless relational conditions.^ 

15. If the outcome of all this is, as it seems to be, that the 
feeling aspect of experience can be refined away into bare 
relations, then we have indeed consistency; but we also have 
unquestionably a fatal break with common sense. And rather 
than accept this break, it would appear preferable to suspect 
some juggling in the argument. Is it not so, Green supposes 
an objector to urge, that the conditions of which we have 
been talking ''are or include relation to feeling? True; but 
relations to feeling are not feelings."^ True also; but how 
can we have a relation to feeling unless the feeling also is 
there to be related? One is constantly puzzled to place in 
Green's arguments the "mere" feeling that keeps cropping up; 
again and again it is proved that mere feeling is a fiction, and 
yet we find the phrase appearing whenever it is necessary to 
contrast sensation with its eternal conditions, or knowledge 
with its partial reproduction in connection with an animal 
organism. What is it that Green really intends here by 
feeling or sensation? The answer to which he appears to 
incline is one that may indeed seem in a way to help his case, — • 
the answer, namely, that sensation is a process of change in the 
physical organism.^ For since the organism, as a physical 
object, has already been reduced to an element in the eternal 
consciousness, we might appear at one blow to have thus got 
rid of the troublesome "psychical" fact of feeling as distinct 
from thought, and of the claims of time to be in any sense 
real, and so to have attained the desired goal of an eternal 
relational content. But also in so doing we have left behind 
even the appearance of a world in time, and of a progressive 
revelation of reality to finite selves. 

16. It has been necessary to deal at length with Green's 

^ Vol. II, p. 1 90. =■ Vol. II, p. 191. 

'Vol. I, p. 12; Prolegomena, Sec. 67. 



244 English and American Philosophy 

metaphysical presuppositions, since, although the ethical in- 
terest supplies the motivating force of his philosophy, and 
colors always its results, it is upon his ability to provide for 
ethics a sound metaphysical foundation that he himself rests 
his case. Meanwhile his ethical theory is also not free from 
difficulties. The conception of moral goodness in terms of an 
absolute and all-embracing end, an ultimate perfection eternally 
realized, has two chances of leading us astray. On the one 
hand we might be tempted to argue that since the good already 
is complete, and I am what I am only because otherwise its 
perfection could not be, my duty is fulfilled, and I may lie 
back at my spiritual ease. To this outcome Green himself 
has not the least inclination, though he is saved from it less 
by pure reason than by his ethical earnestness. What to 
him the conception means is, rather, that because the perfec- 
tion is so high, it should urge me on to greater effort. It is 
true we do not know precisely in what the perfect life consists. 
But the certainty that such a vast and emotion-stirring good 
is somewhere actual, is nevertheless the effective agent of 
progress; it renders us dissatisfied with any existing attain- 
ment, and fills us with a divine discontent that keeps us 
pressing forward. 

But this second attitude also raises certain queries. It is 
not only that a good which in its nature is unattainable by us 
may, if we look at it too closely, lose its motive power; its 
very perfection renders it useless as an actual source of guid- 
ance. The idea of something absolutely desirable but other 
than any specific object of desire, of a supreme good which is 
no good thing in particular, tends, just by its attempt at in- 
clusiveness, to lose its grip on reality, and to pass into ideal- 
istic vagueness. It is true such phrases might only mean 
that we are not to isolate individual ends, and take what is 
partial as if we could stop with it, and rest permanently satis- 
fied. But Green means something more than this. In his 
predilection for a timeless whole, he feels that it is not enough 



T. H. Green 245 

that we should find our good in a temporal process that goes 
on from one satisfaction to another, each desire and interest 
expressing adequately our needs at this particular stage; he 
wants a well-being that shall consist in a complete fulfilment 
of oneself in one timeless moment. And the consequence is 
that not only is it impossible to get any notion of what this 
can be like, but he even runs the risk of pointing us in the 
wrong direction. Green's doctrine here stands for a real and 
important aspect of the moral experience. But if the injunc- 
tion to do one's best, while still recognizing that our best falls 
short always of the ultimate Best, be interpreted, -again, not 
as a warning against moral stagnation merely, but as a reason 
for dissatisfaction with every possible stage of growth because 
it is not something — eternally complete attainment, namely — 
which it cannot possibly be, it is almost certain to direct our 
eyes away from concrete values and ends felt to be worth work- 
ing for on their own account, — even though we recognize in 
words that these are needed to give content to life, — and to 
lead us to place the emphasis on characteristics of the moral 
experience, such as conscientiousness and spiritual aspiration, 
which bring to light that subjectivity of outlook from which 
it is difficult to free the notion of "self-realization." And 
therewith the ideal loses its quality of realism, and is senti- 
mentalized. It gets out of touch with the actual world; it is 
tempted to look with disapproval on our ''animal" nature, 
and the staple facts of human happiness; and it ends by en- 
couraging a man to busy himself somewhat beyond the bounds 
of safety with comparisons of his own character with the per- 
fect standard, with anxious inquiries ''whether the heart is as 
pure as it should be," and with the cultivation of an attitude 
of "genuine self-abasement in the presence of an ideal of 
holiness." Whether the notion of a "better" is really strength- 
ened by this reference to a "best," either metaphysically or 
spiritually, is at least open to dispute. 

17. Meanwhile, in any case, it is clear that Green's stand- 



246 English and American Philosophy 

ard of perfection, even if it offers motivation, does not con- 
stitute an actual source of guidance; and in view of this it 
gives a strong logical standing to a certain practical attitude to 
which the idealistic movement is in general quite definitely 
inclined. If truth is the revelation of an eternal self-conscious- 
ness whose activity lends to us whatever reality we possess, 
but whose full nature lies beyond our reach, wherein consists 
that partial knowledge of God on which we have to rely to 
guide us in affairs of duty? An answer is at hand; since 
knowledge is objective, the revelation of God is to be looked 
for in the past achievements and institutions and organized 
habits of society. But in that case the authority of custom 
would appear to be our only trustworthy guide, leaving it a 
man's highest task to keep "loyal in the spirit to established 
morality," and to perform "fully the duties of his station in 
life." Green's own ethical instincts are not wholly favorable to 
this conclusion; in his Principles of Political Obligation, in par- 
ticular, his sincere respect for human individuality and freedom 
steers him well away from the goal to which he might seem 
pointed. And it is true of course that in theory he presup- 
poses explicitly a constant progress beyond present attainment 
and present formulas. But nevertheless he finds it difficult 
to legitimize any rational principle of guidance for man, in his 
attempt at progress, that is not to be discovered in the accepted 
teachings and practice of the past. Progress goes on, to be 
sure; but it goes on under the influence of hidden forces. It 
is only when it has already defined itself in social achievement 
that we have any conscious source of control; human reason 
consists only in reflecting on these creations, themselves cre- 
ated unreflectively. Consequently in so far as man can reason 
about his conduct, he is wholly dependent on the principles 
of conventional morality, his individual conscience being but 
the presence of reason in him "as informed by the work of 
reason without him in the structure and controlling sentiments 
of society." 



T. H. Green 2^y 

There is an element of truth in this, undoubtedly. If 
human nature holds possibilities that have not yet come to 
light, it is only by acting on faith in such possibilities, and 
not by a clear intellectual prevision, that their content can be 
defined. But the more we insist that these must always be 
embodied in accepted practices and opinions before they con- 
stitute Reason, the more impossible we make it to direct our 
lives through reason except by falling in submissively with 
what we find about us. Green has a method of escaping this 
conclusion ; but it does not seem easy to apply it without going 
beyond his own professed standpoint. We are to separate, 
that is, the principle of progress from specific forms of life, 
and then use this principle to interpret and correct the con- 
flicts between conventional claims. But the "principle" of 
institutions is no plain historical fact, as the institutions them- 
selves are, but is intimately dependent on individual insight 
for its discovery; and the objective method can no more sur- 
vive, therefore, the appeal to principles, than the authority of 
Scripture can survive the right of private judgment in its in- 
terpretation. 

In spite therefore of his firm belief in progress. Green is 
led logically to the conclusion that all forms of authority are 
divine, since they are the actualized products of that world- 
reason which, in the absence of personal standards, we have 
no means of criticizing ; just as, for Newman, Catholic dogma 
can never be an aberration, but is always an addition by way 
of further development. At least we are never justified in 
questioning institutional morality in favor of our private good ; 
when authorities themselves conflict, the case is less simple. 
Green's discussion here is not very illuminating, nor without a 
touch of casuistry; ^ but the practical outcome appears to 
be that we should try to convince ourselves that in principle 
both are right, and so avoid an attitude of conscientious oppo- 
sition to any established institution. Green, as has been re- 
^ Prolegomena, Sees. 321 ff. 



248 English and American Philosophy 

marked, when he comes down to questions of practice, has too 
keen a sense for human justice to live up to this ideal demand ; 
but that only means that his instincts he never quite succeeded 
in reconciling with his theory. 

18. In general, the criticism of Green in the preceding pages 
has come to this, that in trying to justify an objective knowl- 
edge of man and nature as something we start with, rather 
than deduce from what is not knowledge — bare feeling, or 
nervous changes, — he has been led to substitute a logical skele- 
ton of relational content for the actual flesh-and-blood world 
of concrete existences, including, in particular, the human self 
which, not as a string of disjointed feelings, nor as an active 
"principle" identical with the source of all being, but as a 
plain reality in a world of realities, stands over against the 
objects which it knows. If the criticism is justified, it is 
unnecessary, since it applies to them all alike, to stop in detail 
upon the imposing array of names belonging to the more ortho- 
dox section of the school of philosophic Idealism of which 
Green's activities were, among other influences, the occasion. 
Indeed Green is in a way less open to the criticism than most 
of his associates and followers, whose relation to Hegel is 
somewhat closer than his own. The two Cairds may be men- 
tioned here in particular as, along with Green, perhaps the most 
influential protagonists of the idealistic movement. John Caird 
was a Scottish clergyman and powerful pulpit orator, who in 
1873 became Principal of the University of Glasgow; his 
Philosophy of Religion, which seeks to reconstruct the tradi- 
tional arguments for God's existence along Hegelian lines, is 
in some ways the most luminous and attractive single document 
that the school produced. Edward Caird's reputation rests in 
particular upon his monumental criticism of Kant, from the 
point of view of the later German Absolutism; and his aca- 
demic teaching is of special importance in the history of the 
movement, and did a good deal to shape its formulas. 

In accepting Hegel as their inspiration, both John and Ed- 



John and Edward Caird 249 

ward Caird were led still more consistently to turn aside from 
any problems that may be present in connection with the ap- 
parent difference between the human and the absolute self, 
so that even Green feels this as a drawback in their version of 
idealism. Green's own intention had not been to make the 
identification too complete. Indeed, as has appeared, his 
ethics, in which his final interest lies, involves a strong em- 
phasis on the incompleteness of God's presence in man; it is 
this which explains the role of the ideal in ethical experience. 
And accordingly Green proposes to rest his argument, not on 
the logical dialectic of thought, which he sees will be sure to 
suggest to the inexpert the processes of human thought, but 
on the structure of the objective world, and our inability to 
explain its imity without appealing to a synthetic activity 
which we only know as exercised by our own spirit; and a 
definite if rather sketchy attempt is made to account for the 
peculiarities of human thinking, by reference to the animal 
organism through which thought is tied to sensation, and so 
reproduced only piecemeal and imperfectly. But the essen- 
tially logical nature of Green's own interpretation prevents him 
from doing anything like justice to the duality which he 
recognizes, or from offering a satisfactory explanation of its 
possibility; and his notion of a "spiritual agent" distinct from 
the rational content which it unifies, though it has an apparent 
relevancy for ethics, in metaphysics starts more questions than 
it satisfies. 

Accordingly in the Cairds, and in most of the other idealists, 
Green's peculiar emphasis is shifted, — though this does not 
prevent a general agreement with the greater portion of his 
argument, — and a more pronounced tendency is apparent to- 
ward Hegelian gnosticism. Reality is identified with the 
"rational" rather than with the "self"; and human reason is 
used freely to explain the nature of the Absolute, without any 
urgent need being felt to bother with the finite self, beyond 
stopping occasionally to explain that it is not human thinking. 



250 English and American Philosophy 

but God's thought, that creates the world, — an attitude natural 
enough if the empirical self is defined as nothing but those 
elements of particularity in experience which Idealism has 
shown to have no genuine being. From this Hegelian stand- 
point, reality is to be conceived as an organic system develop- 
ing toward the complete and self-conscious expression of that 
which is from the first implicit in it; and in Edward Caird, in 
particular, Green's interest in the ethical experience as a 
process of human self-realization tends to be supplanted by an 
objective philosophy of the historical evolution of human 
thought and culture, as the temporal unfolding of the life of 
absolute Reason or Spirit. 

§ 3. F. H. Bradley 

I. Of the three representatives of absolute idealism who 
would be generally recognized as having had the greatest in- 
fluence on its later career, the first, and in some ways the most 
striking and original, is F. H. Bradley. The peculiarities of 
Bradley's metaphysics, as compared with Green's, have their 
start in the fact that he takes feeling seriously as a fundamental 
aspect of reality. The idealistic thesis that the world is a 
rational world still supplies his major premise; but "thought" 
is definitely rejected as a synonym for reality, and its place is 
taken by "experience," — a term involving no such exclusion of 
feeling and will as thought naturally suggests. And it be- 
comes accordingly no longer necessary or convenient to over- 
look the close connection of thought with human thinking; 
thought is not convertible with real existence, but belongs 
definitely to the world of finite appearance. Moreover, in at- 
tempting to adjust the two theses that reality is rational, and 
yet that it is more than thought, Bradley is led to accentuate 
the element of agnosticism already present in Green. Only 
while, for Green, God is unknowable not because he is un- 
thinkable, but because of the deficiencies of our merely finite 



F. H. Bradley 251 

thinking, in Bradley's case the failure lies in the essence of 
thinking itself. Thought sets an ideal of the rational — as that 
which is free from contradiction — which we must accept and 
trust if we elect to play the game of thinking at all; and it 
tells us how in outline its own demands are to be met. But 
in doing this it also reveals to us that we can reach the goal 
only by leaving thought as such behind; the heaven of the 
rational is to be attained by thought's voluntary immolation, 
and its resurrection in a new form as an aspect of a higher 
unity. 

Bradley's conclusions are backed by a mass of subtle dia- 
lectic, aiming to show the lack of ultimate intelHgibility in 
every concept that the human mind employs; nevertheless the 
general trend of the argument is relatively simple. We have 
first to note two presuppositions which serve everywhere as a 
touchstone for his results. These presuppositions are, that the 
' only notion we can get of reality is in the form of experience, 
after the type that reveals itself in immediate feeling; and 
that this experience is in the end a single experience, the reality 
which transcends the present state of feeling joining on con- 
tinuously to its edges, and forming with it an immediate feel- 
ing whole. Bradley gives of course reasons to justify this 
faith; it comes to him very easily, however, and the heavy bat- 
teries of scepticism which prove so fatal to other philosophic 
convictions are only half-heartedly brought to bear upon it. 
Assuming, then, that reality is a unitary and self-consistent 
whole of experience, the task before us is to discover what can 
be said, if anything, about its more specific nature. 

2. To determine to what extent thought can grasp reality, 
it is necessary first to examine the nature of the thinking 
process. English empiricists had gone on the assumption that 
an "idea" is nothing but a particular psychic existent, occupy- 
ing a definite place in a series of conscious sensations and 
images; and the assumption had got them into numerous diffi- 
culties. Bradley recognizes that, as a cognitive term, an idea 



252 English and American Philosophy 

is not a particular fact, but a universal. In thought, as he is 
accustomed to put it, content or meaning breaks loose from 
existence, the "what" separates from the "that," the idea from 
the image. There is indeed always a psychical image with 
which the meaning that constitutes the idea is somehow con- 
nected. But thinking has to do only with the ideal content 
of this image; and not with the whole content even, but some- 
times with a very minor part of it. The empiricists had found 
difficulty in admitting the existence of imiversals because, 
recognizing nothing but images, they saw that every image 
must be a particular fact, with a definite, even though vague 
and fluctuating, character; and accordingly the notion of some- 
thing that is not, say, any particular kind of triangle, but just 
triangle in general, becomes hard to understand. The difficulty 
disappears when we note that the essence of a universal con- 
sists, not in existence, but in meaning, or reference, or use. 
What the idea intends is not the image in my mind; only 
the abstract character of the image, or the part of it relevant 
to our intellectual purpose, enters into the distinctively cog- 
nitive fact. 

Now the essence of judgment is, that in judging, such an 
ideal content, divorced from existence, is referred to reality. 
The favorite thesis that judgment is a relation between ideas 
misses this entirely. We do not judge about our ideas, but 
about the real; and this real is something that lies beyond 
the judging act, in the sense that it is not a part of its ideal 
content. The true subject of the judgment is, accordingly, 
not the nominal subject, which, equally with the predicate, can 
be expressed only in terms that are imiversals; subject and 
predicate together form a single idea, and this idea as a whole 
is taken as qualifying the real universe. What is asserted 
in the judgment is that subject and predicate are bound to- 
gether by a thread of identity which runs through their differ- 
ences, and that this content, significant only because of the 
fact that the identity is not bare sameness, is assigned to a 



F. H. Bradley 253 

background of reality, revealed not in the ideal aspect of 
"meaning," but in the "existence" side from which, in thought, 
meaning has been divorced — in feeling or perception. In im- 
mediate feeling-experience, and here alone, we come into direct 
contact with the real; apart from this, thought is a network 
of empty abstractions. Feeling is the aperture through which 
we get a glimpse of the real world. And in this point of contact 
all reality is implicitly contained. For feeling is not a mere 
blank. It holds within itself felt differences, though these are 
as yet below the surface of conscious recognition; if it were not 
for this, thought distinctions never could be made explicit. 
And in this way it furnishes a type of the reality at which 
thinking aims — a unity in difference coming home directly and 
unquestionably to immediate apprehension. 

But in this immediate form it fails after all to approve itself 
as fully real, because of its lack of permanence and self-com- 
pleteness. Feeling is constantly shifting, tending to enlarge its 
boundaries and to pass into something else; while reality must 
of necessity be self -existent, substantial, individual. The pur- 
pose of thought is to mediate this self-transcendence, and to 
bring back in a more satisfying form the unity which is con- 
stantly breaking up. For this it makes use of the idea. The 
idea must have its roots in feeling, otherwise it would be a 
pure fiction; but it points beyond the immediate existence from 
which it springs, in the effort to extend this and supply its 
deficiencies. Experience thus ever5rwhere shows broken edges 
which thought is trying constantly to mend by piecing on 
more and more of reality, — a reality always continuous, how- 
ever, with the same real world from which, in feeling, we 
start. 

3. At this point certain important consequences appear 
which it is the business of Appearance and Reality, Bradley's 
most ambitious book, to set forth. Notwithstanding the fact 
that thought has no meaning except in terms of reality, thought 
as such is not real, but ideal ; and the world which it constructs 



254 English and American Philosophy 

lacks the essential note of existence. It aims at reality; but 
in the nature of the case it can never reach its goal without 
itself suffering change. Thought works by way of relations; 
and relational thinking is always in the end self-contradictory. 
No judgment can be wholly true, unless it sums up all the 
conditions on which its truth depends; otherwise its opposite 
may be asserted also, and contradiction results. Thus the judg- 
ment ''political liberty is a good," is only true when carefully 
qualified; and in the absence of these explicit qualifications it 
may be equally true to say that liberty is an evil. Human 
thinking, however, can in the nature of things never be thus 
self -complete. Discursive thought proceeds by way of analysis 
and synthesis. But in analyzing, I never by any chance can 
exhaust the background from which the act of analysis sets 
out; and I have no right to take a part as if it were the whole, 
and assume that what is left out would make no difference. 
The part certainly does not exist by itself; and we have no 
means of knowing that, if taken by itself, it could still qualify 
the sensible reality from which we have extracted it. This 
sensible phenomenon is what it is, and is all that it is; and 
anything less than itself must surely be something else. So 
also of the synthesis by which we endeavor to extend and com- 
plete the immediately given. The whole process here is me- 
chanical, and incapable of restoring a genuine unity; by mere 
successive acts of addition we can never get an organic whole, 
but are led on continually with no assignable limit. 

And not only do v/e find this so as a matter of fact, but 
there is a necessary inadequacy in the nature of relations 
which makes them incompetent to perform the task demanded, 
and leaves us with a mere conjunction that has nothing in it 
to satisfy the need for rational understanding. The difficulty 
appears in its simplest terms if we examine the ultimate con- 
nection between relations and the qualities they relate. Both 
of these are presupposed in the content of thought, and it is 
impossible to merge either of them in the other; how are we 



F. H. Bradley 255 

to construe this situation rationally? Do relations really 
qualify their terms, or do they only stand between them ex- 
ternally? If they are independent of the terms, if relations are 
facts that exist between facts, then what comes between the 
terms and the relations themselves? Either the relation is 
nothing to the qualities, in which case they are not related 
at all, and have ceased to be qualities even, since there are no 
specific qualities where there are no differences; or else we 
have to find a new relation to bring quality and relation to- 
gether, and are committed to an infinite process. On the other 
hand if we take the relations as actually qualifying the terms, 
we are no better off. Since the qualities must be, and must 
also be related, there is now a diversity that falls inside each 
quality. It has a double character, as both supporting and be- 
ing made by the relation; and these different aspects are not 
each the other. But without the use of a relation it is im- 
possible to predicate this variety of the quality; and with an 
internal relation its unity disappears, and its contents are dis- 
sipated in an endless process of distinction.^ Reason will never 
be satisfied imtil, for this wholly unintelligible situation, we 
have substituted a unity which is a source of genuine rational 
insight, such that at every point the whole of reality is lumi- 
nously present, and each single element has the power to de- 
velop out of itself the totality, instead of our being compelled 
to find the unity in the form of a brute fact of conjunction. 
And for this, relations must cease to be adjectives of their 
terms, and both alike must become adjectives of a more ulti- 
mate real wherein the separation of terms and relations has 
disappeared. 

It follows then that thought, so long as we choose to 
think at all, can never abandon the effort to escape self-con- 
tradiction, and reduce the world to a rational and transparent 
whole; but also it cannot possibly, while it continues to be 
thought, and to move in the realm of relations, reach the end 

^Appearance and Reality, Bk. I, Chap. 3. 



256 English and American Philosophy 

at which it aims. The quest however is not unintelligible, 
because we have in the felt unity from which we start the type 
of what we seek. And by conceiving vaguely of a whole of 
immediate experience which no longer seeks to pass beyond 
itself, — because it now includes all reality, — and in which the 
relations which thought has uncovered, — all of which must 
contain their degree of reality, — are taken up into a higher and 
supra-relational form, more adequate than the sub-relational 
form of feeling, we have a standard by which, though con- 
cretely it remains inaccessible, we nevertheless can measure 
the relative truth of the various thought categories. For in 
thus reducing all that is real for our knowledge to appearance, 
we are not to be understood as turning it into mere illusion. 
Every distinction whatsoever is real in its degree, and has its 
place in the absolute whole; and while it must also suffer 
change as a member of this whole, the less of contradiction it 
contains, the less change it will need to undergo. Thought, 
therefore, can at least arrange appearances in the degree in 
which they participate in reality; and this for practical pur- 
poses is sufficient. If morality, for example, is unreal in the 
sense that in the Absolute it would no longer exist as morality, 
— a conclusion which our inability to rationalize the moral life 
completely forces us to admit, — it yet must exist there in some 
form ; and it will continue to stand indefinitely nearer to reality 
than the immoral or the unmoral. 

4. It will be umiecessary to stop here upon the fundamental 
assumption of Bradley's idealism, — that, in order to have the 
unity which knowledge requires, things must possess the special 
sort of unity that comes from being parts of a single whole of 
"experience," — since the criticism that would have to be made 
upon this has already been suggested elsewhere, and will come 
up again in other connections. It is enough to call attention 
to the fact that Bradley's own doctrine of "appearance" empha- 
sizes the point of doubt that may be raised. If our knowledge 
is appearance merely, which changes when it is approached 



F. H. Bradley 257 

from the side of the Absolute, and if the Absolute alone is real, 
where is the limiting principle to be located which renders it 
appearance, and sets up a "iinite center" capable of seeing 
things as they are not? Bradley argues the impossibility of 
answering this question, because to do so would imply that the 
finite is already viewing things from the standpoint of the 
Absolute; and in that consummation the finite must have been 
transmuted and destroyed. But the point of the question is, 
how there could be anything to begin with in possession of 
reality enough to stand in danger of destruction, unless one 
thing at least were left outside the Absolute — the "point of 
view" which prevents finite knowledge from being real. If for 
finite thought nothing can be wholly true, it is natural to expect 
the principle to work in the other direction also — for the 
Absolute nothing can be appearance; and for whom, then, if 
not for the Absolute? 

5. It will bring us however closer to the more distinctive 
aspects of Bradley's metaphysics, if we turn to two further 
assumptions which also underlie his argument. These are, 
first, that the reality which the judgment implies is the reality 
of feeling, or of the immediate perceptual experience; and, 
second, that the goal of knowledge is to become identified with 
reality, in such a way that the difference between itself and 
what it knows is broken down. Now is it — to stop briefly 
on this second claim — really the ideal of knowledge that it 
should endeavor to turn itself into a universe, so that in so 
far as it falls short of this it is defeated in its aim? This at 
least is to misread our usual view. The scientist who sets out 
to know a crystal does not have any ambition to become a 
crystal, or to become a world in which crystals are foimd. 
What he desires is to understand the ideal nature of something 
which he is all the time aware is other than his knowledge of 
it; and if he has any purpose in the end beyond the merely 
theoretical curiosity of a contemplative mind, this at least is 
not the mysticaJ purpose of merging the identity of thought 



258 English and American Philosophy 

and existence. It is a practical purpose; he wants to use the 
ideal knowledge which he gets to advance the active ends in 
which he takes an interest. And for this it is even necessary 
that his knowledge should not become reality. A human end 
is always a particular end, which adjusts itself to conditions 
other than itself; and for successful adjustment, it is essential 
that we anticipate the nature of the facts to be taken into 
account. Consequently it is the apprehension of character, 
rather than identification with existence, with which knowledge 
is concerned; knowledge is sought in order to prepare us for a 
subsequent encounter with existence when we are ready to 
act. Even a social end, where one might expect to find, if 
anywhere, the theory of identity verified, cannot dispense with 
a separateness of thought and things. A social end may to 
any extent you please see in other men the occasion of its 
own advancement, may identify itself sympathetically with 
their good, and recognize a common interest. But there must 
also be the ever-present realization that my fellows are them- 
selves independent sources of action and centers of feeling, 
whose relation to me involves, not a merging of existence, but 
sim.ply a unity of aim and sympathy mediated by my ability, 
through knowledge, to take up their nature ideally into my own 
life; and if this existential difference ever should break down, 
the experience would at once cease to be social, and become 
subjective and solipsistic. 

All this implies, indeed, a sense in which, as Bradley says, 
discursive thought is only a subordinate aspect of experience, 
and points toward something more satisfying and complete. 
But what this means is, that thought alternates with action 
and enjoyment as a stage in a continuous process equally real 
with any stage so long as it is going on, and having its func- 
tion to perform in making other and richer experience possible; 
it is not a mutilated portion of this more satisfying experience. 
It is worth remarking, also, that only when we lose sight of 
this connection of thought with action, can we suppose our- 



F. H. Bradley 259 

selves able to rest content with appearance as a substitute for 
what really is. Knowledge is indeed always appearance in this 
sense, that it grasps the ideal content of the world, and not 
its very stuff and embodiment. But unless it grasped this 
content truly, of what use would it be for conduct? If my 
purpose is only speculative or mystical, I might perhaps be 
satisfied to recognize that in the Absolute my truth is trans- 
formed out of semblance to its apparent character, provided I 
had reason to suppose myself moving in the right direction. 
But if I am concerned to attain personal and practical ends — 
which include my very existence even — under circumstances 
where my success is dependent on reading aright the nature of 
the forces with which I am engaged, and where the slightest 
deviation may mean disaster, nothing short of a confidence that 
knowledge gives the actual essence of reality can serve me, 

6. Now if one finds himself able to adopt this account of 
knowledge as the attempt, on the part of a being with specific 
ends of his own, to read into ideal terms the true nature of 
the world about him for the sake of furthering such ends, it 
perhaps will help make clearer the point next to be raised in 
connection with Bradley's theory of judgment. For Bradley, 
the reality which constitutes the real subject of the judgment 
is presented to us in the feeling fact itself, the perceptual ex- 
perience as an experience; and the business of thought is to 
enlarge the borders of this immediately given bit of the exist- 
ing world by detaching ideal content from it, and using this in 
the effort to bring back unity in a more adequate form. This 
however is not the natural interpretation. Grant that in 
knowledge the idea is not the psychical image, but an ideal con- 
tent, and grant also that in judgment this content is always 
referred to the real world; just what is the reality which it 
intends to characterize? Surely, for the man engaged in 
pushing his ends in the face of surrounding helps and hin- 
drances, it is the independent reality which he needs to know 
that he may take it into account, and not the feeling experience 



26o English and American Philosophy 

which for the moment is himself. The thing which in knowl- 
edge I characterize by objective qualities is not the sensation 
as a feeling, or any extension of it, but the agent to which my 
organism has to adjust itself, — an agent which I am assured 
would be there no matter what happened to me or to the 
feeling. I may indeed scrutinize the feeling experience itself, 
and bring to light its limitations and its conditions; but then 
I am engaged on a different quest and with a different object — 
a psychological one. 

It is true indeed that I may be said directly to meet reality 
only in sense perception, and that the universe is the extension 
of this point of immediate contact. But it is true in two 
different senses, which cannot safely be confused. The first 
meaning is, that my conscious experience, with its sensational 
content, is itself a portion of reality, — the only reality I am 
ever literally identified with. On the other hand, it is also true 
that only in connection with sensation is there revealed to me 
the presence of anything beyond this field of conscious experi- 
encings. And if we fail to distinguish this second claim from 
the first, we shall probably be led to regard the world of known 
reality which sensation mediates or reveals, as experientially 
continuous with the immediate reality of the sensation itself, 
since no form of contact with reality other than immediate 
identity has been recognized. But if we do allow a valid dis- 
tinction here, the conclusion no longer holds. The feeling is 
indeed a reality necessary somehow to carry the ideal content 
which the knowledge function uses. And it is a reality which, 
when later it comes in turn to be recognized, philosophy is 
bound to find a place for in the universe; this is indeed just 
the starting point of the complications which idealism has been 
found trying to evade. But it is not the reality which per- 
ceptual knowledge is professing to characterize. For knowl- 
edge, the point of contact with the real world is not feeling, 
but the active forces, external to the organism, with which in 
feeling we find ourselves in contact. 



F. H. Bradley 261 

7. Such a point of view does not forthwith resolve Bradley's 
logical difficulties about relations; but it eases to a degree the 
general situation. If it is no business of knowledge to go be- 
yond appearances, — the "nature" of objects, that is, — then it 
does not stultify itself because it fails to merge with feeling, 
while still retaining its special relational character. It does 
not aim to be existence, but only to think existence truly — to 
take up into itself cognitively the ideal content which existence 
really has. And if it can accomplish this, there is no reason 
why we should refuse to say that in knowing reality as it 
appears, we know it as it is. Just because knowledge is ap- 
pearance, it does not know appearance. It knows the reality 
which appears — which has, that is, the qualities and relation- 
ships that in the idea are, for a special purpose, and not on 
account of any cognitive inadequacy in us, given into our grasp 
apart from their embodiment in the existing world. Knowledge 
is not the outcome of a disintegration in immediate feeling, 
whereby both factors are mutilated and forced to look for some 
unknown form of reconciliation. To know is to apprehend 
the nature of an object presented to us, along with the recogni- 
tion that this nature is not a mere fact of logic, but something 
that has an actual embodiment in the existing world; it is 
through this contemplative recognition of the settled presence 
of the ideal character in the real object, and not through the 
recognition of its relation to an immediate experience of feel- 
ing from which it has been provisionally estranged, that the 
reference to existence enters into the judgment. And there 
seems no reason at all why a description of the nature 
of a thing should be falsified merely because it is a descrip- 
tion, and not the thing itself. It is true that the descrip- 
tion is always partial, and therefore liable to be modified by 
other features yet to be discovered. But we have no ground 
for supposing that this completer understanding must needs 
turn our present knowledge into error, — that the elements of 
truth that we now possess might not persist, essentially un- 



262 English and American Philosophy 

changed, as our knowledge is enlarged. Bradley's warning 
against regarding any aspect as real "in itself" takes advantage 
of an ambiguity; because a fact cannot really exist by itself, 
in isolation from the world to which it belongs, it does not 
follow that it may not be real in itself — may not in so far have, 
in the context to which it belongs, just the character that it 
professes to have. 

8. To deal at all adequately with Bradley's destructive 
criticism of relations is impossible without becoming involved 
in an extended and intricate discussion. There is, one must 
grant, some justification for the complaint that discursive 
thought is in a sense artificial, and fails to attain the point of 
view from which organic unity springs. Thinking which 
passes from one link to another in an endless chain, — and all 
thinking that deals with particular facts of existence necessarily 
does this, — is in danger of missing something of the inner 
meaning of the real. Certainly the concrete particulars which 
make up the world can never be exhausted by a being who 
starts from a few isolated items, and attempts to piece these 
out by inference, — if for no other reason, because he cannot 
take a step in inference without adding therebv a new fact 
that calls for further attention. But if the world turned out to 
have some systematic character as a whole, there rpmains a 
chance that this might, in an abstract way, be grasped in 
thought. The suggestion of such a possibility is found in 
Bradley himself; why might not the higher reaches of experi- 
ence — experience as it has become already modified by the 
results of thinking — furnish a type of the more intimate con- 
nection between things which we desiderate, and so provide a 
hypothetical form to be brought to the interpretation of the 
world, that escapes from the mere linkage of facts? The 
aesthetic experience is a promising example; here it is possible 
to hold that we have an instance of that luminous inner unity 
we are looking for, above relations in a sense, as mere feeling 
is below them. And from a realistic point of view, there is no 



F. H. Bradley 263 

reason why this should not provide perfectly good knowledge 
so far as it goes. A non-discursive form of experience can, if 
we have once experienced it, later on be known, provided 
knowledge is not definable simply as a dialectical process, but 
includes the power to contemplate in their proper nature reali- 
ties independent of the act of knowing; nor is there any reason 
why our relational thinking, even, should not be valid of it, 
though doubtless it cannot be completely exhausted by analysis. 
Because relations have thus entered into a significant whole, 
where each element is felt in its bearing on all the rest, they 
have not ceased to be relations; the relations which the critic 
discovers in a work of art are the same relations that he feels 
to be there before his critical apparatus is applied, or criticism 
would be wholly futile. 

For Bradley, however, all this is excluded by the peculiarities 
of his thesis. Since relations by h3^othesis have, in a higher 
experience, entered into a different context, for him they are 
no longer what they were; or, put differently, since logical 
thinking is not of reality, but is reality at a particular level, 
when it passes into a different form of experience it ceases to 
be relational, and so escapes all our categories. But after all 
the fact remains that we do have a knowledge of non-discursive 
forms of experience, and mtist have some knowledge of them 
if we are to talk of them at all; and knowledge cannot safely 
be defined in a way to make it impossible that we should know 
things that we actually do know. Meanwhile it is hardly sur- 
prising that Bradley himself should give up the attempt to 
realize the nature of the whole with the instruments which he 
leaves at his disposal ; a world from which the self with all its 
purposes and experienced realizations has been discarded, and 
whose material is nothing but the mass of "finite centers" of 
experience fused in one unchanging unity of feeling, cannot be 
expected to reveal its secret to human thought. 

9. There remain plenty of dialectical difficulties about the 
nature of relations, which it is not an easy matter to resolve. 



264 English and American Philosophy 

One caution however should not be overlooked. It is hazardous 
to lump relations together without regard to the empirical 
differences they show. The relationships that constitute "or- 
ganic" unity are what give most plausibility to the claim that 
relations are internal to their terms. Where a unity of end or 
meaning is involved, this does actually permeate the terms 
in so far as they are members of the whole; the character of a 
hand as a hand would cease on its ceasing to be a part of the 
body, and the character of a note as entering into a melody 
would disappear if the melody were broken up into its con- 
stituents. But there are other instances where the case is 
much less clear; so far as appearance goes, the qualitative 
nature of red, for example, does not depend upon its relation 
to blue, but would be equally what it is were there no other 
colors to compare it with. Meanwhile, before we are in- 
timidated by the threat of an infinite regress, the possibility 
deserves to be considered that, even if a relation is merely 
"found," it still does not require another relation to connect it 
with its terms, simply because it is a relation to begin with, 
and the nature of a relation is not to be related, but to relate. 



§ 4, Bernard Bosanquet 

I. In certain important respects, Bernard Bosanquet may 
be regarded as a follower of Bradley, and his logical theory, 
in particular, is throughout influenced by Bradley's Logic. But 
on the other hand he is much closer to Hegel than Bradley 
was ; and it is not always easy to reconcile the two strains. In 
spite of a general adherence to the metaphysics of his prede- 
cessor, the flavor of nescience has very largely disappeared. 
The justification of this change of emphasis is mediated by a 
use of the distinction, already suggested by Bradley himself, 
between discursive thought and experience, Bosanquet seems 
to hold, that is, to the possibility that thought in the narrow 



Bernard Bosanquet 26^ 

sense can be precipitated and stored in more developed forms 
of experienced immediacy, and that our acquaintance with 
such thought-fertilized experience opens up therefore a chance 
that our thinking may not be so far removed from reality as 
Bradley had supposed. In this way he thinks it possible to 
maintain the fundamentally logical character of reality even 
in its concreteness and immediacy, while yet avoiding the 
criticism that charges the idealist with mere "intellectualism." 

In appealing to experience as more inclusive than thought, 
then, we are not to understand that knowledge is to be de- 
posed from its central place. The logical motive is still supreme 
for understanding the nature of experience; it is the logical 
nisus, the endeavor of a part to find its completion in a whole, 
which supplies the clue to all that is significant in the world 
and its development. The center of Bosanquet's philosophy, 
alike as logic and as metaphysics, is the conception of "indi- 
viduality" as a systematic whole expressing itself in every part. 
Such an individual whole, by definition identifiable with the 
real universe in its totality, is alike the goal of knowledge, 
the end of conduct, and the supreme object of admiration and 
devotion. Against this stands the tendency, the root of most 
that is bad in philosophizing, to take as individual, as some- 
thing essentially real, the starting point of knowledge rather 
than its outcome. True individuality means self-existence, 
self-dependence, completeness; and nothing can be an indi- 
vidual therefore beyond which there lie other things to limit 
it. Bosanquet's pages are a sustained polemic against splitting 
reality into parts, going back to the simple instead of forward 
to the more comprehensive, taking some supposed core of ex- 
istence, such as sensations or finite selves, as truly real, and 
reducing the whole to a product of their unessential com- 
bination. 

2. If this be taken simply as logic, there is one sense in 
which it represents a truth not apt to be disputed. If we try 
to understand at all, we are compelled to assume the intercon- 



266 English and American Philosophy 

nection of things; and the more we know about this intercon- 
nection, the more we are likely to comprehend the full nature 
of any object in particular. For knowledge, stability and 
satisfaction are not to be found at the beginning, but in the 
larger vistas that free us from the narrowness of mere un- 
mediated facts. And if we wish to call this total realm of 
things by the name of the Absolute, it may be a convenience 
in terminology. But the recognition that there is a whole of 
some sort does not, in so far, tell us anything whatever about 
the character of its wholeness. Conceivably we might find 
it, in a measure, a whole only loosely bound together in a 
relatively external way, a connection of reals existing in con- 
junction, and having relations such as those of time and space, 
similarity and difference, without the more intimate bonds that 
certain of our purposive and significant human experiences 
reveal. Of course wherever such a higher unity is found, it 
ought to be recognized; but logic, and the mere truism that 
the more we know about a thing the more we know its con- 
nections, does not require that of necessity we have to find 
it everywhere. 

And it is not perfectly self-evident, even, that so intimate 
and comprehensive a unity is always to the advantage of 
the thinker. If we allow logic to have anything to do with 
that instrumental character which unquestionably is an aspect 
of empirical thinking, thought seems often quite content to 
stop with relative disjunctions and partial lines of connection. 
Indeed it is only as the knowledge of a general schema of 
reality, lacking in all but the vaguest recognition of its par- 
ticular features, and satisfying spiritual rather than scientific 
needs, that any philosopher has ever been able to find a use 
for his ideal of a systematic whole; for science, whose interest 
is not to get a rapt vision of the divine purpose in its concrete 
totality, but to guide conduct aright, it is an actual gain to 
simplify the situation, and to take the immediately relevant 
connections in their separation from a context which quickly 



Bernard Bosanquet 267 

becomes unmanageable. It is not easy to see how an attempt 
to view form and number in the light of their spiritual sig- 
nificance in the universe would advance the study of mathe- 
matics; and the more we override the specific serial ordering of 
events in the interests of reducing causality to a complete "sum 
of conditions," the less relation it bears to the work of actual 
scientific discovery. For certain types of conduct we need, 
to be sure, a very broad understanding of the world, to which 
nothing, so far as we can tell beforehand, may come amiss. 
But if we are going to appeal at all to the empirical needs of 
conduct, we ought to recognize that these needs vary, and are 
often met by exclusion rather than by inclusiveness. Indeed 
they are always so in some degree; an absolute vision of the 
whole in its concreteness would bear no relation to conduct, 
since if it could be realized conduct would be superseded. It 
seems most natural to interpret the whole belief in unity as 
itself a pragmatic demand, a presupposition of logic which is 
not itself susceptible of logical or metaphysical demonstration. 
The first point of difficulty, then, concerns this transition 
from a unity, as a mere formal demand of thought, to the 
particular kind of unity which alone shows the marks of "indi- 
viduality" — the unity of purpose, or — not to imply the tem- 
poral sequence which enters into human purposes — of signifi- 
cance, or spiritual meaning. Where do we get the assurance 
that the universe as a whole is a realization of spiritual value? 
It would be most consistent with idealistic presuppositions to 
suppose that we get it from an analysis of the accepted world 
of knowledge; but the facts do not bear out such a claim. 
That the content of human history progressively tends to em- 
body such a unity of purpose, might be allowed; and accord- 
ingly idealism is always at its best when it is interpreting the 
world of institutional values. But, for any knowledge that 
we can safely presuppose to start with, human experience has 
its roots in a far vaster world, where not only does significance 
fail to reveal itself unambiguously, but where we are almost 



268 English and American Philosophy 

surely led astray in practice if we try to import it. We may 
have our methods of reinterpreting this scientific universe to 
bring it into line with purpose; but at best the interpretation is 
a debatable one, and is not forced upon us by the plain facts 
of knowledge. It remains, accordingly, to find the source of 
our confidence in the fonnal demands of thought or logic; 
we may argue, that is, that full intelligibility is given to reality 
only in case we suppose the connected elements to enter into a 
significant whole, which unites them through the presence of a 
plan or meaning for whose expression they are needed. And 
undoubtedly we should like to see such an intelligible neces- 
sity in our thought constractions; but is it also a necessity of 
thought that this demand must needs be gratified? The claim 
on the part of a finite creature to a specific sort of intellectual 
satisfaction, no more than to a specific sort of emotional satis- 
faction, can be supposed to impose laws upon the universe, 
apart from an act of faith that goes definitely beyond the logical 
reason. If indeed it were ever safe to presuppose in philosophy 
that problems have been settled once for all, we might refer 
here back to Hegel; for Hegel has shown, it may be said, that 
a significant whole is the necessary outcome of the movement 
of thought, since only thus can we escape the contradictions 
that emerge on every lower plane. Most people, however, will 
be less sure than Hegel that two opposing statements "con- 
tradict" when they are taken m different senses, and in respect 
of a different aspect or relationship; and while no doubt the 
full truth will contain both aspects, they do not find it evident 
that this is bound to mean that they are taken up into a new 
and individual category. And that in any case Hegel has 
actually succeeded in capturing all the truth about reality for 
a single category, itself free from contradictions, a follower of 
Bradley at least can hardly be expected to maintain. 

3. The point of this contention might of course be dulled 
if we were to accept the idealistic denial of any difference be- 



Bernard Bosanquet 269 

tween the logical processes of thought and reality itself; and 
as Bosanquet is peculiarly insistent in this denial, some further 
remarks may conveniently be made upon it here. After mak- 
ing the necessary qualifications, we may grant the virtues of 
an ideal of philosophy which conceives it as an attempt, apart 
from the limitations of particular ends, to think the general 
nature of the universe as a whole, in a way that shall throw 
light upon the special concepts which the mind employs 
through a discovery of their implication in a more organic unity. 
From this standpoint, thought may be regarded as a self-depend- 
ent process whose driving force is the need to remove contradic- 
tions, and to displace the incoherency of a first view of things by 
an organized system requiring nothing beyond itself to render 
it intelligible. "Truth" is this systematic whole at which 
thought aims. Nothing in consequence can in this sense be 
wholly true, as Bradley had urged, except the Absolute itself; 
a lesser judgment that falls short of this has only a degree of 
truth, a degree that can be gauged by the success with which 
it gathers up and reconciles discordant elements. This means 
that no judgment possesses truth in its own right, but only 
by virtue of its logical connection with other judgments in a 
system; we call it true when its assertion leads to a completer 
harmonizing of the data than its denial would. On the other 
hand, no judgment is completely false; for it contains a logical 
content which it is obvious cannot be reduced to sheer non- 
being, and which consequently must find some place in the sys- 
tem which includes everything that is. The falsity of the 
judgment means that it is partial, as all human judgments are, 
though in varying degrees; and especially is it false when, being 
partial, it is taken by some one as completely true. 

At best however it seems very doubtful whether this ideal 
of method, taken alone, serves fully any purpose other than 
that of a philosophic contemplation of the abstract character 
of existence. Whatever its aspirations, the "concrete universal" 
with which it really leaves us is one of concepts only, and 



270 English and American Philosophy 

not of the concrete actualities of the existent world, with its 
particular contingent data. The problems with which Bosan- 
quet is dealing are all of them problems of the logical interpre- 
tation of categories; and even if we do find these categories 
implicated in a system, it still remains a part of the business of 
philosophy to try to understand the actual complexity of the 
universe of particular facts and processes. And then we are 
once more met by the claim that our knowledge, and the things 
we know, are, concretely, two quite different facts within the 
universe, which it is one of the tasks of thinking to adjust. 
Accordingly if we start by denying the right to raise such a 
problem, it can only be because we are willing, again, to take 
the real world, and the realm of descriptive logic, as identical, 
and refuse to entertain the notion that thought has any sig- 
nificant connection with a finite thinker. 

Now there is an important sense in which it may indeed be 
said that it is not man who judges, but the world that judges 
in him; true thought, that is, does not depend on personal 
caprice, but follows its own objective leadings, and we in a 
sense stand off and note the direction which it takes. This 
ignores, to be sure, the equally apparent fact that although, our 
premises once chosen, logic determines the conclusions we shall 
draw from them, it does not determine the selection of the 
starting point ; and this, in a world too complex for us to start 
from everything at once, introduces a large element of sub- 
jectivity into the thinking even of philosophers. But in any 
case what legitimately follows, is only that the world is one 
where logical relations hold such as our thought can follow out, 
and not that logical processes as such constitute the movement 
of reality itself, and require no aid from a human thinker. 
Bosanquet seems almost on the point of recognizing the dis- 
tinction here, when he grants that objective "meanings" can 
be entertained by the mind without being identified with 
reality. The explanation which he goes on to give of this seeks, 
indeed, to retract any dangerous admission, and to return to 



Bernard Bosanquet 271 

pure logic; the world of objective reference, that is, and the 
world of reality, are actually the same world, regarded in the 
former case as composed of isolated though determined con- 
tents, and in the latter case as composed of contents determined 
by systematic combination in a single coherent structure ^ But 
we still are lacking in an explanation of kow these fragments 
can be held apart from reality, without acquiring a standing of 
their own as "ideas"; and in any case the fact is that our 
world of objective meanings has any degree of coherency de- 
manded, and that the idea of the universe enters just as much 
into the convention of discourse as any other idea. If one 
did not have a theory to maintain, it would seem far more 
natural to say that the world of reality goes beyond the world 
of meanings, precisely through the fact that ideal characters 
there possess a status which is more than logical, and so stand 
existentially apart from the human thought about them. Since, 
Bosanquet remarks, the world of truth, and the world of mean- 
ing, are distinguished only as part and coherent whole, they are 
not really distinct, and logic investigates a single process of 
the whole which is the truth or reality. But whether truth, 
or complete logical content, can be identified with reality, is 
the entire point at issue. 

4. By use of the same distinction, we may meet the para- 
doxes of the idealistic theory of truth and error. If "truth" 
has no other meaning than harmony and completeness of logical 
content, — and it need not be denied that it has this meaning 
among others, — then indeed there can be but a single truth; 
of human truths none are wholly true, or wholly false, and 
when an American humorist spoke of the report of his death as 
being exaggerated, he was unintentionally a profound philoso- 
pher. Here the implication is that truth moves wholly within 
the world of logical description; when I talk of the truth of 
anything, I mean all that is true about it, its complete explana- 
tion, and connection with the rest of reality. But truth, or 

^ Logic, Vol. I, p. S- (2nd Ed.) 



2^2 English and American Philosophy 

"tnieness," has also a significance that adds to this a specifi- 
cally human reference, and that presupposes a distinction be- 
tween my thinking and the object whose nature I assume to 
know; and if a particular element of content really belongs, not 
to the world at large, but to the particular part of the world to 
which my thought intends to refer, then my judgment is true 
without reservation, regardless of what more may be true also. 
It is only certain kinds of truth that are seriously in danger 
of being "transformed" by the discovery of their wider con- 
nections. A scientific theory, such as the nebular hypothesis 
or the theory of evolution, or a social ideal that involves com- 
plex human purposes, we all recognize as likely to change in 
incalculable ways with the further growth of knowledge; but a 
categorical judgment of fact, if it is true at all, we may acqui- 
esce in with the confidence that here is something that all 
theory must respect and leave in its integrity, whatever ad- 
ditional information about it may be forthcoming. 

There may be good reason to hold that the criterion of truth, 
the intellectual test that tells us, when we are in doubt, what 
truths in particular are true, lies in the success with which a 
given claim enters without contradiction into that larger system 
of judgments which constitutes our already accepted knowledge 
of the world; truth can only be tested by more of itself, and 
not by something outside itself. But in this there is nothing 
inconsistent with the supposition that the entire system of 
ideal content which makes up the "what" of truth may be 
embodied in an actual world of existences. For the "coher- 
ence" theory, apparently, we begin with pure logical content, 
and progressively weave this into a pattern, belief attaching 
solely to the absence of contradiction in the outcome; it is 
quite as plausible to suppose that we start with an instinctive 
acceptance of certain characters in particular as belonging to 
an actual world which our practical lives need to presuppose, 
and that it is the force of this original belief, modified in detail 
by the success or failure of experimental action, which lends 



Bernard Bosanquet 273 

to "facts" that categorical compulsion before which mere "sys- 
tems" have to bow. For Bosanquet, the "correspondence" of 
thought with objects, which this separation of human ideas 
from existence would appear in some sense to imply, is taken 
always as reducing knowledge to mere copying, a useless re- 
duplication of reality already complete; "the underlying ques- 
tion seems to be," he writes for example, "whether in cognition 
we are cooperating in the self-maintenance of reality, as our- 
selves organs within it, or are apprehending ab extra some- 
thing finished and complete apart from us." There is no 
contradiction, however, between apprehending a reality as it 
already exists beyond the act of knowledge, and making a con- 
tribution through which reality is enriched, if only we take 
knowing in its natural context, and do not assume that it has 
no other function than either to be reality, or to repeat it. 
Thought effects its contribution by enabling us to reconstruct 
the world about us; but it can do this only in so far as it does 
adequately reproduce for thought the particular conditions 
which conduct has to take into account. 

5. Waiving however epistemological difficulties of the more 
technical sort, and granting the right of the philosopher to 
attempt by ideal experiment to find some large and organizing 
concept which shall illuminate the darkness of the merely 
"given," and turn its fragmentary disorder into system, what 
are the actual merits of the particular solution which in Bosan- 
quet's hands the principle of individuality supplies? That for 
him the finite human individual is not the clue to this insight 
has appeared already; the finite person shows his unreality by 
the way in which his life is forced to get its content by passing 
beyond its own narrow boundaries. The true individual is 
not the atomic and exclusive self, but the wider organic unity 
— the family, the state, art, religion — to which the self looks 
for its completion. It is this content of civilized and institu- 
tionalized culture which supplies the positive inspiration for 
Bosanquet's whole philosophy; it gives us the clue to the 



274 English and American Philosophy 

nature of the Absolute, and from it man derives practical and 
ethical guidance for his life. The human self is merely 
the expression of one of the partial points of view which the 
richness of the absolute reality requires; it is the "spirit of 
the whole working in and through a limited external sphere." 
This means that, on the side of its finite limitation, the con- 
scious life is to be thought of as identified with certain con- 
ditions in the physical world which give rise to what we know 
as an animal body. But these conditions it redeems from their 
mere externality. It brings to light their implicit meaning as a 
part of the one significant system; moulded by nature, it elicits 
nature's spirit, a secret even from itself, and thereby forms 
the medium through which the absolute experience expresses an 
essential aspect of its being. 

6. On its more verifiable side, as an interpretation of the 
inner significance of human experience, such a conception of 
the self is, up to a certain point, both true and important. 
Clearly there is a sense in which a man's true self is not his 
separate self-identity; it involves relations to a larger whole. 
Bosanquet, however, insists on interpreting this in a particular 
way; and if the interpretation is not accepted, the sole alterna- 
tive he will allow as possible is the conception of man as a 
bare unit, an "exclusive and repellent personality," with no 
significant connection with the rest of the universe. And the 
reason for his inability to conceive any middle ground between 
total absorption and total isolation, rests again on the identifi- 
cation of reality with logical content. Naturally if we reduce 
reality to logical truth, and truth to significance, we shall be 
able to assign no sense to any claim to exclusiveness of exist- 
ence, except as we suppose it to deny the presence of signifi- 
cance or meaning altogether. And if we decline to adopt so 
desperate a course, then the institutional realms of the state, 
of religion, of art, since they undoubtedly possess significance, 
will be real in the same sense in which the self is real; only 
they are more real, being more inclusive. And in this way the 



Bernard Bosanquet 275 

self turns into a mere phase of institutional experience, with no 
existence, and no rights, and no destiny, save as these are con- 
ferred by the superior ends which it helps express; the finite- 
ness of the self stands for mere powerlessness, mere limita- 
tion,^ and has as such no significant role. In a rather surpris- 
ing passage Bosanquet frankly puts this absorption of a human 
self in the "truer" self of the social whole, on exactly the 
same level as the absorption of a philosophical system in one 
that is logically more adequate.^ 

But to interpret finite individuals as "connections of content" 
within the real individual to which they belong, and their ex- 
istence as only the "status of being an appearance" — the par- 
tial aspect of a logical whole,^ — simply does not match with 
our convictions about what a self is. Of course again there 
is an undeniable sense in which the "reality" of a man is more 
than his bare existence. But if the being of a self is worthless 
in separation from its social content, significance vanishes 
equally in the absence of an individual self-identity and exist- 
ence; a necessary implication in the very value which tran- 
scends a human soul, is the fact that all values are meaningless 
apart from that conscious appreciation of value which only 
finds a place, for any natural way of thinking, in personal 
beings. Bosanquet's emphasis is *n one aspect of it wholly 
justified. Value is not mere feeling, but has a definite and 
objective content; and as active and practical beings, it is 
the last to which our attention ought chiefly to be directed. 
But this content nevertheless presupposes all the time, — ^we can 
overlook it because it is thus present always, — that there is 
called forth in us by the object of value a feeling attitude, 
without which "appreciation" would turn into a mere colorless 
recognition of fact. 

Bosanquet's ability to ignore this is due, one may suspect, 

^ Value and Destiny of the Individual, p. 56. 

' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. XVIII, p. 503. 

'Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 181 ; Logic, Vol. II, p. 258. 



2y6 English and American Philosophy 

to an ambiguity in the term value, or significance, to which his 
preoccupation with logic tempts him. For "value" is clearly 
identified by him at times, and perhaps fundamentally, with 
logical value, or implication in a logical system; and between 
this and "felt" value there is nothing whatever in common, 
save as logical system may itself become an object of value, 
aesthetic or practical, if we introduce again the relation to a 
self capable of appreciating it in feeling terms. And this 
furnishes an explanation for the peculiar fact that, when we 
forget differences of terminology, the actual content of Bosan- 
quet's system, with its repudiation of the "psychical," and of 
the human form of purpose even, often approaches very closely 
indeed to the "naturalistic" foes of idealism, and leaves the 
Absolute as a mere theatre for the interplay of natural forces, 
having no community either with the "self" of Green, or with 
the God of religion. 

7. In the end, however, considerations such as these prob- 
ably will have less weight with us than judgments based on 
our immediate sense of values themselves. And there is a 
type of mind that always will draw back from this constant 
disparagement of the finite self, from the insistence that the 
human will is nothing but a medium through which the uni- 
verse expresses itself, that freedom consists only in subordina- 
tion to social and spiritual institutions, that the destiny of 
individuals has no ultimate significance, and that in the senti- 
mental impersonalism of Dante's treatment of Beatrice we 
have the highest way of dealing with the fact of human person- 
ality. We apparently possess no logical instrument such as will 
enable us to appraise authoritatively the difference in appeal 
which values make; in a competition of ideals, one can only 
set the rivals side by side. In Bosanquet's ideal the chief 
persuasiveness, but also its deficiencies in part, lies in its 
aristocratic qualities. Since the fate of the lower experience is 
to be absorbed in the higher, where alone it has significance 
and truth, we are called upon to live always under tension, 



Bernard Bosanquet 277 

at the highest level to which our insight can attain. The uni- 
verse we are to conceive as a "place for soul making"; and 
the essence of soul quality is not pleasantness, or comfortable- 
ness, or mere goodness even, but greatness and splendor, the 
"union of austerity and passion." To raise in this sense the 
level of life justifies civilization, quite apart from any happiness 
that individuals may secure; indeed the more deeply we see 
into the truth of human nature, the more we recognize that 
pain and evil will always be necessary to give life its proper 
elevation and consistency. Evil is here not to be eliminated, 
but to be surmounted, to be woven into the texture of experi- 
ence so that life may possess that tragic quality without which 
it will seem mean and trivial to the aristocratic mind. 

And this suggests what on the whole would appear to be the 
most fundamental point of view from which Bosanquet's ideal 
of value is to be approached; it is constituted by the aesthetic 
interest, rather than the ethical. Even in his logic the ground 
is set for a certain indifferentism towards evil. Since truth is 
not the rightful attributing to reality of specific qualities under 
the lead of our vital interests, but only a matter of somehow 
getting all possible content into a single comprehensive judg- 
ment, we are bound to recognize that there is something to be 
said for every claim and every counter-claim. "Error" is not 
to be repudiated, but absorbed; all varieties of relative points 
of view and one-sided emphasis come together in the one ulti- 
mate experience of reality and value. Now this is not an 
attitude that falls in easily with the special interests of 
the moralist ; and indeed in theory it appears that the Absolute 
cannot as such be ethical, though ethical values are present 
in it. The final truth of the world is not that it is good, but 
that it is the wider set of conditions out of which the good life 
arises, the theatre of all the wealth of experience, with good 
and evil alike playing their part. Evil, that is, is not ab- 
sorbed in good. It is absorbed in perfection, where it still 
retains a positive function; and perfection is a higher concept 



278 English and American Philosophy 

than the good, which last belongs definitely to the stage of 
finite experience, and not to reality as a whole. Even re- 
ligion, therefore, is in the end unreal. Religion means the 
will for good as against evil; and a universe in which this 
antithesis is absorbed in perfection, cannot be identified with 
a God who represents one-sidedly the triumph of good alone.^ 
For the revelation of this higher point of view we are re- 
ferred, though not without some hesitation, to the aesthetic con- 
sciousness. The Absolute is the great Artist before whom the 
drama of human existence, of good in conflict with evil, is 
staged; and the highest attainment of human perfection is to 
purge oneself of human claims, and, in the spirit of tragic aus- 
terity, to catch this same vision of life, and admiringly to call 
it good. More precisely, two motives may be distinguished 
here — the dramatic and the logical ; though in»both the aesthetic 
appeal is almost equally present and constitutive. That 
acceptance of reality without rebellion or repining which has 
so large a place in Bosanquet's spiritual ideal, is not the 
realistic acceptance of "fact," as something which, since we 
cannot change it, it is the business of the wise man clear- 
sightedly to adopt and build upon. Such a factual reality it is 
necessary to recognize if our lives are not to be futile; but 
there is no particular reason to idealize it as perfection. What 
alone justifies the title is rather, in the first place, the aesthetic 
value that resides in the logical completeness of the system of 
reality, in the presence of which a subjective wilfulness has no 
standing. And accordingly from this point of view evil persists, 
redistributed and resystematized, in the Absolute, precisely as 
there is supposed to be room in truth for the elements of error; 
it is a solution of the problem of evil in terms of logic. Of 
course however what this really means is, that no qualities of 
life are wholly valueless in their proper place.^ And accord- 
ingly such a solution falls short in an essential point; moral 

^ Value and Destiny of the Individual, pp. 216 f., 250. 
'Ibid., p. 217. 



Bernard Bosanquet 279 

evil consists not in the raw material of desire and instinct, but 
in an active attitude. This attitude of will is what the 
dramatic concept now restores, by turning the world of mere 
logical completeness into an active play of forces. But since 
thereby the latter world becomes primarily a value, not for the 
actor who strives to overcome evil, but for the spectator who 
finds in it the positive source of his emotional exaltation, the 
ethical interest tends necessarily to subordinate itself to the 
artistic. 

8. There is to be sure an ethical turn that we may give to 
this, if we suppose the gaze of the spectator to be shifted from 
a contemplation of the universal drama to his own inner life. 
So interpreted, the highest good comes to be found, not in re- 
moving evil, but in retaining all the ills of life while getting rid 
merely of their blindness and irrationality; in transforming 
"brute agony and dumb endurance and despair into spiritual 
conflict and triumph," and raising suffering to the level of 
tragedy. And such a triumph over necessary evil is no doubt 
an essential ingredient in the spiritual experience. But it is 
not clear that we can afford to stop with this, and leave life at 
its highest on the level of tragedy. To begin with, one runs 
always a risk of attitudinizing when he contemplates his own 
career as "tragic." It is hard, too, not to suspect that the 
high perfection of tragedy is more apparent when one is himself 
comfortably seated in the audience, free from the poignancy 
of the tragic situation. And at least this insistence on a "great 
and splendid" life has the drawback that it is apt to generate 
a blindness to the milder and humaner virtues, and a disposi- 
tion to look with something like contempt upon the human 
weakness which limits the power of most men to play the 
role of tragic hero. 

This lack of sympathy is particularly apparent in a prac- 
tical attitude toward the world of individual "claims" which 
there has already been occasion to note as implicit in the natural 
logic of the idealistic school. Bosanquet has little but impa- 



28o English and American Philosophy 

tience with the prevalent discontent with the social structure, 
the crusade against political and industrial injustice, the em- 
phasis on the right to individual opportunity and happiness. 
The cry against injustice is a weak and pessimistic complaint 
against the universe, which our feeble minds are quite incom- 
petent to sustain; with the existence of evil justified in principle, 
we ought to see that it is unreasonable to try to set limits to the 
degree in which evil is called for by the needs of perfection, 
or to mark off certain evils as undesirable and deserving of 
extinction.^ In any case, for the individual to set up a claim 
against the whole is to reverse the true notion of individuality, 
and to subordinate reality to appearance. The duty of man is 
to awaken to his own nature, and his unity with the greater 
Mind, rather than to mould the course of the world as an 
independent cause; ^ instead of "arbitrarily preferring some one 
element of experience to the whole," and setting out to weight 
the scales in its favor, we should welcome whatever comes to 
us, — or to others, — and aim only to assign it its true relative 
importance in the perfection of the universe. Ethics and re- 
ligion join hands in assuring us that true peace and excellence 
lie, not in self-assertion, not in individual striving even for 
the good, but in offering oneself as a contribution to the true 
being of the universe, in accepting correction from the world 
and adjusting oneself to its requirements, in cultivating a 
"genuine devoutness and loyalty before which the given self 
seems a little thing, and lightly to be sacrificed for the chosen 
transcendent good." Politically this means that the individual 
ought to be subordinated to the social will embodied in the 
habits and institutions of his community. Such a will, to be 
sure, is imperfect ; but it is imperfect only because it is incom- 
plete, and not because it ever takes a radically wrong direction, 
or shelters injustice and oppression which the individual re- 
former, seeing in this instance more truly, may set himself to 
eradicate. If Objective Mind is incomplete, at least it is 
^ Ibid., pp. I."?? f. ^Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 158. 



Bernard Bosanquet 281 

always more complete than ideas which rule any individual 
mind ; and the latter has accordingly no standing in court when 
the two conflict.^ 

The inference is a fair one; but only again in case we ac- 
cept the logical theory on which it rests. The social structure 
does contain more truth than any individual mind is likely 
to compass; it has a many-sidedness which only very labori- 
ously, and never quite completely, our private speculations 
trace. And if breadth of compass is the only mark of truth, 
and error means only incompleteness, then the smaller scope 
of the individual mind is decisive as against his right to criticize 
the social order. But a more natural view of error would 
allow us to regard the attributing of some particular content to 
reality as actually true or false without reference to a knowledge 
of the whole; and, consequently, it would justify the proba- 
bility that the individual mind may be superior in insight to 
the General Will on this or that matter of detail, although it 
would condemn as rash the rejection of social experience in 
its entirety, and an attempt to replace it wholesale by the 
efforts of the private reason. 

9. As the perfection of the Absolute is gained by a refusal 
to consider the human self as an existent, so Bosanquet is 
enabled by the same method to construct a theory of the rela- 
tion of the self to Nature which avoids any touch of the dualism 
he is anxious to escape. The solution comes by reducing the 
substantial facts of physical process at work independent of, 
and prior to, the advent of man, and of the psychical as a 
distinctive new content with an existential status, to logical 
formulas — the formula of "externality" on the one hand, 
and of significance or "interpretation" on the other. In this 
way the conscious life becomes nothing«which it is necessary to 
adjust to body, but merely the realization of the meaning al- 
ready implicitly present in the physical, — a "supervenient per- 
fection" which constitutes the method by which the Ab- 

^ Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 123. 



282 English and American Philosophy 

solute enhances experience for itself. Finite consciousness is 
only an awakening to the significance of a certain realm of 
externality to which it serves as a center; it has nothing of 
its own but the "active form of totality," and everything posi- 
tive it derives from nature.^ 

If nature means here what it does to the scientist, — ^and we 
have no right to take it otherwise, — this claim that no new 
content, but only a higher degree of relational unity, is pres- 
ent in the realm of mind, is not very easy to understand. To 
say for example that painfulness is not a new qualitative effect 
appearing on the occasion of a physical prick, but only the "in- 
terpretation" of the prick, the "appreciation of what is hap- 
pening," ^ seems little more than a form of words, which sim- 
ply turns aside from the peculiar essence of the fact to be ex- 
plained. If by "appreciation" here we mean awareness merely, 
we are translating the entire content of the conscious life into 
terms of intra-bodily movements; and this, apart from other 
difficulties, is at least strange doctrine for an idealist. If 
on the other hand, as supposedly is true, appreciation is 
meant to have a reference to "value," we find ourselves again 
drawing on the ambiguity previously noted. The value of a 
work of art, which is the analogy that Bosanquet has in mind, 
may intelligibly be spoken of as something realized in a con- 
tent, and not a new form of content. But this is because the 
work of art, with its given logical structure, can make a 
peculiar impression on an observer; and there is nothing ana- 
logous to an observer in the mind-body situation, unless indeed 
we are ready to conceive of the human mind as a picture 
painted on the background of nature for an eternal Con- 
noisseur. 

And even the verbal solution will not work in the end, ex- 
cept as it tacitly abandons the conviction from which the prob- 
lem springs — the existence of a real world antecedent to human 

^Principle of Individuality and Value, pp. 160, 367. 
"Ibid., p. 197. 



Bernard Bosanqiiet 283 

experience. Externality has no meaning for the Absolute, we 
are told, except as it passes through finite minds. The natural 
world is nothing but the system of all individual experiences; 
it lives only in the efforts of all spiritual beings to sustain 
a unity of experience, taken in their completeness as success- 
ful.^ "Our" world is just our objective experience itself, con- 
ceived as playing a part in the self -maintenance of the eternal 
whole which absorbs all possible facets of reality. At best, the 
question what becomes of the object when unexperienced by 
finite minds is a "minor matter," which it is unnecessary to 
pursue. Of course if nature is nothing but a form of finite ex- 
perience, of a relatively low degree of internal unity and mean- 
ing, through which mind passes to constantly more significant 
wholes, then the problem of explaining how a human mind can 
know a world existing as a prior condition of human experience 
will be solved by elimination; and the task of reducing all 
reality to terms of cultural significance becomes much simpler. 



§ 5. Josiah Royce 

I. In Josiah Royce, the most eminent of the American 
idealists, a new and original turn is given to the idealistic pro- 
gram, whereby the logical motive, hitherto chiefly in evidence, 
loses its predominance, and a much closer approach is made 
toward dealing with the actual difficulties that confront the 
realistic mind. Royce keeps throughout close to the ground of 
empirical reality, and is largely free from that disposition to hy- 
postasize logical concepts which Hegel's influence fostered. 
Instead of tacking on finite experience, as the English Hegelians 
had for the most part done, to an Absolute already fully char- 
acterized in terms of timeless logical content, and having there- 
fore no obvious room for it, he starts by taking the finite fact 
seriously as a bit of real existence. That apparent character 

^ Logic, Vol. I, p. 84. 



284 English and American Philosophy 

which knowledge possesses in the shape of a reference beyond 
itself, instead of being slighted, now stands as a necessary step 
in the argument; while also for the first time a central place is 
given to activity or will, as against mere thought or intellect 
on the one side and feeling on the other. So to the diffi- 
culties arising out of the relation between the finite and the ab- 
solute, — for the most part treated very cavalierly by the Eng- 
lish idealists, — Royce keeps returning constantly. Even the 
timelessness of reality, which seems ordinarily to make so hope- 
less any chance of reconciliation between metaphysics and 
everyday common-sense, is interpreted and defended, not in 
terms of the repugnance of pure logic to the time process, 
but on the empirical and psychological basis of the experience 
of duration, wherein time distinctions are transcended. 

2 . Royce's argument sets out from the common-sense belief 
that our ideas point to a reality beyond themselves and their 
own content. This postulate seems involved everywhere in 
our natural understanding of experience, though a critical 
examination shows that it is not without its difficulties. How 
can a state of mind know what by definition is not present to 
that state of mind? Must not an object somehow be already in 
my possession if I am to mean, or intend it? How can I be cer- 
tain that my knowledge hits the mark, that it corresponds to the 
reality I mean it to correspond to, if this reality is wholly out 
of reach, and beyond the possibility of testing? And yet, on 
the other hand, if the object which I know be taken, not as 
something beyond the knowing experience, but as the very 
content now present to the consciousness of the knower, we 
have indeed escaped the former difficulty, but only at the ex- 
pense of a thoroughgoing relativity which breaks down all dis- 
tinction between truth and error. For if the object about 
which I judge is just my own meaning or interpretation, then 
I can never be mistaken; and in consequence no such thing 
as objectively valid truth exists. What any man believes to 
be true is true for him, since he is judging about an object open 



Josiah Royce 285 

immediately to his own inspection; and his judgment cannot 
come into conflict with that of his neighbor, because no two 
men judge about the same object. 

It is impossible, however, to rest in a doctrine of absolute 
relativity ; for one thing, as the very phrase suggests, it contra- 
dicts itself. Our thesis is that there is no absolute truth, but 
that what each man thinks is true, for him is true. But then 
what of this truth that there is no absolute truth? — is this also 
true only for the one who thinks it? Meanwhile it may not 
be impossible to make sense after all of the claim of an idea 
to "mean" an object. There is one situation in which such a 
claim is sufficiently intelligible, — when, that is, I later succeed in 
getting an experience which fulfils the intent of my earlier 
meaning. Here the relation of correspondence between idea 
and object loses its opaqueness, because the two have now come 
together within a single unity of consciousness where they can 
be compared, and the justice of the claim tested. And it is 
only in this way that the possibility of error can be explained. 
If we take any single judgment by itself, error is excluded by 
the fact that the object of which we judge is for us precisely 
what it is, and nothing else ; error has meaning only in terms of 
a wider judgment which is able to take up into itself the nar- 
rower one, and note its deficiency. I find myself in error, there- 
fore, when a wider reach of consciousness reveals the partial 
character of a previous judgment; and I can conceive the possi- 
bility of error even when as yet it has not been thus corrected, 
in terms of an ideal spectator whose range of consciousness shall 
include mine, along with whatever in addition is necessary to 
correct my one-sidedness. 

Truth and error, accordingly, are both definable, have mean- 
ing, only on the basis of a unity of consciousness which brings 
the judging idea into connection with its intended object, and 
so reveals the presence or the absence of the correspondence 
which the idea claims. And not a mere possible, but an actuaJ 
consciousness is demanded, since mere possibility, facts that 



286 English and American Philosophy 

are not facts for someone, ideal determinations not embodied 
in a "that," it is impossible for the mind really to conceive. 
Let us doubt then to the uttermost. But doubt, if it is not to 
be a word without meaning, at least must assume the possibility 
of error, and so the existence of a conscious life in which the 
answer to our doubt is a present reality; unless thought and its 
object are parts of a larger thought, I cannot even so much 
as doubt. Accordingly whoever has a belief, whether true or 
false, about objects beyond the moment of belief, is thereby 
shown to be an organic part of a reflective and larger self; 
and thus we have the assurance of reason for the existence of 
a single universal Thought, — since, if we try to think it as mani- 
fold, this manifoldness would still be a truth that must be true 
for a more comprehensive unity, — in which all possible ques- 
tions that mean anything at all receive their perfect solution. 

3. The second stage of Royce's philosophical devolpment 
is in a way already implicit in his doctrine of meaning; but 
it did not get full expression until he was confronted by the need 
for meeting certain ethical objections, based on the apparently 
precarious standing of the finite individual, and his moral life, 
when reality is reduced to a single absolute of thought. The 
form which the problem takes is that of accounting for the 
individual, or of finding the principle of individuation. For 
Bosanquet, also, the individual forms the central problem of 
philosophy; but in his case an interest in the finite person is 
almost wholly confined to showing that this is not an individual 
in the truest sense. Royce on the other hand, owing to his 
greater preoccupation with the moral life, is concerned pri- 
marily to explain how there comes to be this unique focussing 
of reality in human selves, while at the same time safeguard- 
ing its genuine significance in the world. 

And the solution takes the form of assigning to Will, and 
to the concept of purpose, a place in the structure of reality 
hardly suggested in his earliest writings. In God, it has ap- 
peared, all possible questions are answered, all possible ideas 



Josiah Royce 287 

fulfilled. If we were content with a merely logical universe, 
there would perhaps be no great harm in leaving the matter 
here; but we have elected to start from a real world of exis- 
tences, over against the innumerable ideal possibilities which 
have no existential standing, but are hypotheses contrary to 
fact. Now in mere thought, which alone we have so far been 
using to interpret the Absolute, there is no ground for the 
preference of any one world over any other. All are equally 
possibilities present to the divine consciousness; and some new 
principle needs to be added to the intellectual one, if we are 
to explain the superior reality of the one existing world. This 
principle, then, Royce finds in Will. The essence of will he 
takes to be the act of attention which singles out a determinate 
aspect of content, leaving the rest in the background; and in 
order to explain the fact of the one preeminently real universe 
we need to postulate such an act of selective attention, whereby 
a specific system of ideas is realized while others are left as 
mere logical possibilities, — an act that from another angle may 
be regarded as the divine Love, which sets up an object of 
preference unexplainable on merely theoretical grounds. 

And now the same principle leads to a theory of the human 
self also, and to the justification of his significance for the life 
of God. The uniqueness of a self, no more than the unique- 
ness of the real world, can be understood in purely theoretical 
terms. Every idea without exception is a universal; and con- 
sequently there is no way in which we can define it so as to 
limit it to a single exemplification. It is only as a thing is the 
one thing that will satisfy an interest that uniqueness has a 
meaning; it presupposes a particular and determinate purpose, 
for which no other object could be substituted. (In passing, 
the question may suggest itself what constitutes that unique- 
ness of a purpose which here seems to be assumed, — its relation 
to the satisfaction of another purpose?) Now the unitary 
world-whole is differentiated into many confluent purposes; and 
a self is precisely such an idea, or plan, or interest, demanding 



288 English and American Philosophy 

a specific form of fulfilment. But while the self has thus no 
reality outside a higher individual life which embodies all the 
wills represented by finite ideas, nevertheless these finite selves 
are not swallowed up and abolished in the divine life. If they 
are dependent upon God, so equally is God dependent upon 
them, since without the specific contribution that each one 
makes, God would not be what he is; and as God's will is free, 
an autonomous act lying deeper than the phenomenal world 
of causal connection, so each self shares in this freedom, and 
nothing except his own choice in all the universe determines 
him. 

4. In the light of this conception, Royce reconstructs his 
original theory of knowledge, by assigning explicitly to cognitive 
meaning a teleological or pragmatic character. The interpreta- 
tion of the connection of idea and object in terms of a ful- 
filling experience, is translated into the more specific form of 
a relation to plan or purpose; and Royce tries to show how 
the "external" meaning — of correspondence — is reducible in 
the end to an "internal" meaning of teleology — the conscious- 
ness of how I propose to act. The object of knowledge is thus 
nothing but a specific end, already present implicitly and par- 
tially in the idea, which gets its explicit fulfilment in that 
wider consciousness of the Absolute where both the purpose, 
and its realization, alike are present. The proof consists partly 
in an attempt to show the absurdities of a realistic view of 
being, which proposes to accept as final the notion of corre- 
spondence between two independent entities, and partly by an 
ingenious use of the evidence for a close relation between knowl- 
edge and will. Thus it undoubtedly is true that knowledge 
is a "nascent deed," in the sense that ideas tend to pass over 
into appropriate action; and this pragmatic relationship is at 
least not wholly irrelevant to the definition of the object itself, 
since it is a part of the concept of a knife, for example, that 
it is used for cutting. Again, it is a connection with active 
interest that alone explains why our attention singles out this or 



Josiah Royce 289 

that object in j>articular, refers to or means it; even the ab- 
stract constructions of science may be called an embodiment 
of our purpose of convenience in explanation. And by a 
subtle use of the symbolic character which the "image" may 
have in knowledge, and of the fact that different symbols may 
be useful under different circumstances, — the requirements of 
mathematics, for example, being hindered rather than ad- 
vanced by concrete imagery appropriate in other situations, — 
the character of correspondence, even, is made definable in 
terms of purpose, the sort of correspondence to be demanded 
of the idea being determined by the intention of the idea itself. 
5. Only a brief word needs to be added about Royce's more 
recent writings, since they show a shift of emphasis rather 
than any essential difference of doctrine. The concept of the 
"social" had from the start played an important role in his 
thinking. Thus the world of nature is altogether a social prod- 
uct, as that which forms the common element in a universe 
of discourse; and even to God we are related only through our 
fellows. In his later years this notion of the Community, con- 
ceived as a higher form of selfhood, "as truly a human being 
as you and I," and superior in value as in extent, has a tendency 
to displace in emphasis the remoter Absolute. In particular, 
this takes the form of an exaltation of the idea of "loyalty" 
as the supreme ethical value, — concretely, a loyalty to the com- 
munity regarded as a more inclusive Person, but sublimated for 
philosophy into a loyalty to the spirit of loyalty as such. 
Waiving the doubtful point as to whether it is possible or wise, 
either theoretically or practically, to enlist morality so strongly 
against that spirit of individual liberty which claims the right 
to keep in check the organized power of society, Royce's doc- 
trine may be regarded as an enforcement of one moral duty 
in particular — the cultivation of an attitude of "good-will," as 
supplying the necessary condition on which the solution of 
most concrete moral problems is dependent. The same teach- 
ing underlies Royce's latest formulation of his metaphysics in 



290 English and American Philosophy 

the theory of "interpretation," with God as the Great Inter- 
preter, — a restatement of his fundamental absolutism which 
is rather more edifying than it is closely reasoned. 

6. Royce's entire philosophy evidently rests upon the co- 
gency of his initial argument for idealism. The point of the 
argument is, to repeat, that neither truth nor error is intelligible 
save as the idea which has a meaning, and the object which it 
means, come together in a single unity of experience, where 
the latter is seen to be a fulfilment of the former. And the 
necessity for such an inclusive consciousness rests mainly upon 
two points: Royce endeavors to show that the ordinary notion 
of the independence of the object of knowledge is untenable, 
and that its claims are satisfied, and better satisfied, by a 
different interpretation. This latter argument takes its start 
from the doctrine that had become a commonplace in English 
empiricism. If we have made up our minds that all reality 
must be reduced to experience, as against the existence of an 
independent world, then the only meaning of the statement 
that an object is real when I am not perceiving it is, that under 
such and such conditions the experience can be secured. Such 
an argument, however, gets a compelling force only in case 
we have already given up any faith in a contemporaneous ob- 
ject existing when it is not perceived. It is a legitimate 
hypothesis, and may turn out to be required as a substi- 
tute for our first belief; but it is an h5qx)thesis which 
presupposes the bankruptcy of the more familiar notion 
of perceptual knowledge. Royce introduces it with a clear 
recognition of its hypothetical nature; but as he goes on he 
insensibly tends to drop this recognition, and to take it as the 
only verifiable interpretation, ignoring the fact that at least it 
has changed essentially the original situation that called for 
explanation. For the occurrence of a future experience — the 
only thing that is really "verifiable" — is distinctly not what 
we ordinarily think of when we talk about "objects." It is 
one thing to mean a "real" object now existing, and quite an- 



Josiah Royce 291 

other to mean a sensation or perception that will later on 
exist; we have knowledge in both cases, but knowledge of two 
very different facts. 

The departure from our everyday convictions is still greater 
in the more developed form of Royce's doctrine. The relation 
of a purpose to its fulfilment does not in any sense represent 
our first understanding of what is intended by the relation of an 
idea to its object; the thing which we suppose ourselves to 
know, we readily distinguish from the end of knowledge, to 
which end it stands normally as a condition or a means. A 
purpose will indeed usually be present; but even the act of 
attention which selects the object — itself also distinguishable 
from the object it selects — is not identical with this purpose, 
but rather is dependent on it. This empirical difference be- 
tween knowledge and the end it serves, it is almost impossible 
to overlook where overt and practical purposes are concerned; 
and it holds even of the intellectual purpose in the narrow 
sense. We have, to be sure, a desire to know, which is satis- 
fied when knowledge is attained ; but the relation between this 
desire and its satisfaction is not the relation betv/een the idea 
and the object, but presupposes already the object's existence. 

The h)^othesis, then, can plausibly be taken as established, 
only in case we have first gained the right to discard the more 
natural belief, as Royce indeed is ready to allow; whenever 
the failure of his teleological terms to satisfy our common prej- 
udices becomes too apparent, he is accustomed to call atten- 
tion to the fact that the only alternative lies in an acceptance 
of the notion of independent objects, and that such a possibility 
has already been excluded. The backbone of the theory is thus 
the refutation of realism; but this refutation turns out to have 
peculiarities which limit its power to convince the realist him- 
self. 

Royce sets out by defining the realistic conception of reality 
as the total absence of relations.^ Now few realists will recog- 

^ World and the Individual, First Series, Lecture III. 



292 English and American Philosophy 

nize this as their intention; when it is said that, as a matter 
of fact, the object exists independently of its being known by 
me, it is scarcely meant that such independence constitutes 
its existence. Its existence is what it may happen to be; and 
its independence — its existential independence — of knowing 
is only one consequence of this. Nevertheless the entire force of 
Royce's reasoning depends upon thus loading the dice against 
independence by his preliminary definition. Once grant that 
reality is definable as itself nothing but a total absence of re- 
lations, and it is no hard matter to show the suicidal conse- 
quences. But if we suppose, as of course we must, that the 
existence of the object is something different from its relation 
of independence, there seems no reason why it might not have 
this relation, and other relations as well, without ceasing to 
be existentially other than an experience which knows it, 
unless, that is, the power of relations to be real outside a uni- 
tary mind be regarded as excluded; and while this may per- 
haps be the case, it cannot be taken for granted in an argu- 
ment intended to demonstrate it. When realism talks of an 
object as "wholly other than ideas," it does not need to mean 
that ideal characters are to be excluded from the description 
of the object, but only that it embodies them in a form of 
existence which is not identical with their existence as thoughts 
of ours; all the dialectical difficulties arise, once more, from the 
determination, already familiar in the idealist, to absorb ex- 
istence in logic. 

7. Meanwhile positive difficulties are not lacking in the 
way of Royce's theory. For one thing, it does not seem clear 
how an absolute experience is going after all to save the de- 
ficiencies of human knowledge — the knowledge we are con- 
cerned primarily to explain. Royce insists that knowledge im- 
plies the recognition of a "beyond," while yet it has no meaning 
unless this transcendent fact is already in the possession of the 
self that knows it. But if the self that gives intelligibility to 
knowledge is not my empirical self, but one of which my em- 



Josiah Royce 293 

pirical experience confessedly falls short, what light does it 
throw upon the fact of human knowing? Royce tells us that 
an incomplete idea, a single judgment uncorrected by a wider 
one, knows only its incomplete content, about which, therefore, 
it cannot be in error; when John judges about Thomas, the 
judgment is not about the real Thomas, but about John's idea 
of Thomas, since the real Thomas never becomes any part of 
John's thought at all.^ As a matter of fact this is not an ac- 
curate account; John's judgment is not about his idea of 
Thomas, but his idea — the logical content, not the psychical 
phenomenon — is precisely what he judges about the real 
Thomas. But if we do adopt Royce's analysis of the single 
judgment as a starting point, it seems fatal to his conclusion. 
For if the object of my judgment is in reality only my present 
content or idea, then / cannot mean a beyond. A larger mind 
which includes my idea along with the object may see that 
the latter is the fulfilment of the former; but if meaning is 
defined in terms of fulfilment, I in my finiteness could not 
have the sense of meaning at all. 

Once grant, meanwhile, that I as a finite being may know 
objects beyond myself, not by including them in my own ex- 
perience, — for then they would not be beyond me, — but by ap- 
prehending their logical nature or essence, and Royce's whole 
theory of error, with its momentous consequences, falls to the 
ground. For the recognition of an error it may well be that we 
need a wider judgment which shall show wherein the narrower 
judgment is at fault. But this only says that error is not 
known as such apart from wider knowledge; and there is no 
need that the conditions that lead to the discovery of error 
should constitute the nature of error as well. This wider judg- 
ment does not make it necessary that the realities about which 
we judge should enter into a single consciousness. It is enough 
that we should be able to compare their descriptive content; 
and the two descriptions might very well enter into a unity of 

* Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 405, 408 ff. 



294 English and American Philosophy 

knowledge, without dragging after them the reahties whose 
nature they profess to describe. Doubtless in some sense I 
must, as Royce urges, already "possess" an object in order 
that I may know what object I intend; but why is it not 
enough that the possession should be the ideal possession that 
knowledge involves — the presence of a recognized idea or con- 
tent referred to reality at a point at which I come into practical 
contact with it as an active agent, — rather than the actual pos- 
session of a deeper self of which I am not in the least aware, and 
other than the finite self that does, for our human experience, 
the actual knowing? A logic which leads to the conclusion 
that every finite act of knowing is a knowledge of the entire 
universe, and our apparent ignorance only an inattention to 
details, calls for rigid scrutiny before it is accepted.^ 

And in particular it might be asked how, if the recognition 
of error presupposes actual as distinct from logical inclusiveness, 
I ever could detect an error held by another man, since Royce 
allows that for empirical experience the two selves do not co- 
alesce. The case of our knowledge of other selves offers indeed 
rather special difficulties. The objectivity of nature means, for 
Royce, that it is socialized, communicable, categorized knowl- 
edge — what he calls a "world of description"; it is knowledge 
content which is held in common, and so it presupposes already 
an acquaintance with other selves. And unless parts of our 
experience come to us merely labelled "social," leaving us to 
find out by inference what this means, it would appear accord- 
ingly that this logically prior knowledge must bring us into 
actual contact with the inner life of purpose and appreciation 
in our fellows. But the mechanism for this, obscure at best, 
Royce makes doubly hard to understand by distinguishing im- 
mediate "appreciation" as lacking in those categorized qualities 
that constitute the world of "description"; and consequently he 
is found maintaining both that social experience must be pre- 
supposed before experience of the world of nature is intelligible, 

^ World and the Individual, Second Series, p. S7- 



Josiah Royce 295 

and yet that the object of social experience is an appreciation 
which is private and incommunicable. Royce imagines indeed 
the possibility of a sort of experience such that my neighbor's 
mind might be shared by me, and so laid immediately and 
telepathically open to my inspection.^ But it is the Absolute, 
again, who alone enjoys this insight; and our possibilities of 
knowledge are consequently still left unexplained. 

8. One further logical difficulty may be noted briefly. 
Royce insists repeatedly, — this is essential indeed for his treat- 
ment of ethics and religion, — that every last detail of our finite 
experience is present just as it is, though of course illuminated 
by a wider context, in God's life, in the same way in which 
sensational elements enter into the unity of experience we call 
ours. There is, however, one feature of finite experience where 
this becomes an apparent contradiction — the conscious sense of 
finiteness and limitation itself. A part can be a mere identical 
part of a whole, only so long as it does not recognize or feel it- 
self as such a part ; this sense of limitation cannot also be pres- 
ent unchanged in a whole for which the limitation has ceased to 
exist. The analogy breaks down because the elements in ex- 
perience for us do not have this realization of their own sepa- 
rateness, or the peculiar emotional attitudes that go along with 
it. To appeal to our ability, for example, to appreciate the 
force of an argument while yet we see its limitations, is not to 
the point ; what we need to suppose is, that one can at the same 
moment believe something to be a truth which nevertheless is 
seen to be in error. And since I do believe many things that 
are erroneous, these experiences just as they are for me seem ex- 
cluded from the life of an omniscient God. One thing that helps 
Royce to overlook this difficulty of getting the finite bodily in- 
side the Absolute, is the rather surprising absence, in his anal- 
ysis, of any adequate recognition of "feeling" in experience, as 
distinct from thought and will; for it is the peculiar felt char- 
acter of our existence that occasions most of the difficulty, and 
^ Spirit of Modern Philosophy, pp. 395 f. 



296 English and American Philosophy 

this character naturally is lost when we translate reality into 
terms of thought or knowledge. And the same deficiency leaves 
Royce's whole doctrine of the individual moving after all in the 
region of abstractions. If individuation is due simply to an 
act of voluntary attention to one system of ideas, at best all that 
we have done is to give a preferential position in the mind to 
what are still ideas, or logical facts. The notion of purpose 
seems indeed at first sight to bring us closer to the actual world. 
But the more we insist that thought and purposive action are 
identical, the more we are left with a purpose that consists only 
in the movement of ideas, — a "movement" still further with- 
drawn from the world in which purpose gets its significance for 
man, by the fact that this thought is at the same time eternally 
complete. 

9. The criticism in the last paragraph touches another, and 
particularly vital point in Royce's philosophy. From the time 
of the publication of the Conception of God, a large share of 
his energy went toward counteracting the charge that his ab- 
solutism is fatal to human freedom and responsibility, and 
so cuts at the root of the ethical life. Royce exercises all 
his ingenuity to escape from this entanglement. But the same 
difficulty appears here as before, and in an aggravated form; 
the analogy with the sort of fact to which alone we can ap- 
peal, fails in an essential feature. The union of a multitude of 
individual wills in the divine will can only be approached in 
terms of the union of various impulses in the finite life. But 
the significant difference is, that the impulse does not as such 
recognize itself as having a particular aim to which others are 
external; an impulse is only an impulse in a self, and is not 
an /. Metaphorically it may be said sometimes to take the 
reins in its own hands, and aim at its own satisfaction. But for 
the strict point at issue this is nothing but a metaphor; and in 
any case such a thing can only happen as life is disorganized, 
which God's life presumably is not. In so far then as we are 
genuine selves, there is but a single will that operates in us, 



Josiah Royce 2^y 

though there are many interests; and accordingly the concep- 
tion of an Absolute which includes a number of wills, and allows 
each a degree of freedom undetermined by other wills, or by 
the whole purpose to which they contribute, is strictly unthink- 
able, if we demand for our conceptions, as Royce rightly does, 
a ground in experience. It is significant that when Royce 
comes closest to grips with the metaphysical difficulties of his 
conception, he is forced after all to leave the world of concrete 
experience, and to resort to highly abstract and technical logical 
devices, where the infinite riches of the spiritual life pass into 
the infinite monotony of a "self-representative system." 



§6. The Idealistic School. McTaggart. Howison. Hocking. 
Latirie. Seth Pringle-Pattison 

I. Among the numerous adherents of the idealistic move* 
ment who call for briefer mention, the majority keep fairly 
closely to the lines marked out by Green and the Cairds. Here 
belong the names of William Wallace, the translator and inter- 
preter of Hegel, William Leonard Courtney, Richard Lewis 
Nettleship, Robert Adamson (in his earlier writings), John 
Watson, D. G. Ritchie, Henry Jones, J. S. Mackenzie, J. H. 
Muirhead, R. B. Haldane, C. C. J. Webb, and others. A rela- 
tively more independent rendering of Hegel is to be found in 
J. D. Baillie. Baillie is acutely conscious of the dualisms that 
still persist even in the attempted correction of Kant by Green 
and his followers; and this incomplete idealism he traces to a 
failure to realize that perception, understanding, reason, 
morality, religion, are not independent functions or co-existing 
departments of mind, but different levels in the life of spirit in 
each of which a single principle is expressing itself; each has 
its own worth therefore, and none, not even the highest, can 
take the place of the rest. The business of philosophy is to 
explain them by showing their necessary place in the continuous 



298 English and American Philosophy 

development of the one spiritual life, through their varying 
degrees of approximation to the whole. Meanwhile however 
the old difficulties about the relation of this seemingly psycho- 
logical conception of "experience" to the individual human life, 
and of its "development" to the reality of time and to the unity 
of the Absolute, are still left very obscure. Somewhat outside 
the ranks of the professional philosophers are to be noted also 
May Sinclair, whose spirited and readable Defense of Idealism 
seems specially influenced by Green; and E. Belford Bax, 
whose insistence on an "alogical" element in reality tends to 
bring in by the back door motives not altogether consistent 
with his absolutism. 

2. In America also, German philosophy, first seriously ex- 
ploited by W. T. Harris and his organ the Journal of Specu- 
lative Philosophy, quickly displaced the older Scottish phi- 
losophy in the colleges. Here the influence of Royce is nat- 
urally apparent, while in recent years that of Bosanquet has 
been on the increase, very largely through the teaching activities 
of J. E. Creighton in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell 
University. Bosanquet's influence is conspicuous also in R. F. 
H. Hoemle. Mary Whiton Calkins is perhaps the most 
prominent disciple of Royce. A free and relatively independent 
recent rendering of the idealistic tradition is George P. Adams' 
Idealism and the Modern Age, which attempts, as against the 
pragmatic and naturalistic reduction of knowledge to a bio- 
logical control value, to vindicate the validity of the mind's 
attachment to objective "ideal structures," that call for recog- 
nition, knowledge, and love, rather than for mastery. Another 
and voluntaristic idealism of the Fichtean type is represented 
in Hugo Miinsterberg, whose long residence in America, and 
a certain influence he exerted on American thinking, should 
perhaps give him a place in this account, though his intellectual 
affiliations are with Germany. Miinsterberg divides sharply the 
over-causal and over-individual real world of appreciation and 
purpose, as a world of pure will-acts to be interpreted rather 



Hugo Munsterberg 299 

than explained, from the phenomenal universe of science, where 
values are displaced by a mechanical nexus; and he endeavors 
by a brilliant tour de force to organize the world of absolute 
values — it appears that there are twenty-four of them — in 
terms of their necessary implication in the original will-act. It 
is this last that creates for us a permanent world out of a flux 
of passing experience, by the one fundamental deed of seeking 
identities, in which we find an absolute satisfaction that has 
no reference to pleasure, but rests only on the demand which 
the will makes for self-consistency. 

3. The direct influence of Bradley has been less in evidence 
in America. Among English philosophers, A. E. Taylor and 
Harold Joachim are probably to be classed as his followers, 
though the former is hospitable to many other motives also, 
in particular to the voluntarism of Royce. Joachim's Mean- 
ing of Truth is noteworthy for its candid recognition of cer- 
tain ultimate difficulties in the idealistic theory of "coherence" 
which have not been hidden from hostile critics, but which the 
idealists themselves have seldom fairly faced. The systematic 
knowledge which human minds possess is not, Joachim recog- 
nizes, even at its best, that living organism of Reason as a 
significant whole which the coherence theory of truth demands, 
but only, after all, a more or less logically complete descrip- 
tion set over against a reality to be known — an ideal "what" 
divorced from existence; and therefore inevitably it after all 
suggests "correspondence," in some form, as the standard of 
its truth. And until it can be seen, as no philosopher now pre- 
tends to see, how reality requires as a necessary moment in its 
self-maintenance an arrest that issues in finite duplications of 
itself — modes which may even set themselves in that subbom 
assertion of their own completeness which is the essence of error 
in its full discordance, — and how truth for us comes to take 
the form of a "wandering adjective" in correspondence with a 
reality to be known, we are involved in fundamental contra- 
dictions; our theory makes certain demands which both must 



300 English and American Philosophy 

be, and cannot be, met. While however Joachim thus allows 
that if the coherence notion of truth be sound, no theory of co- 
herence can itself be completely true, he does not consider the 
possibility that it ought to be abandoned. 

4. There remains one fairly distinct group among recent 
idealists, distinguished by a common purpose to give back 
to the "self," in one fashion or another, a place in the system 
of reality from which Hegel's influence was always tending to 
dislodge it. In most cases this grows out of an ethical and 
religious interest; in John Ellis McTaggart, however, the motive 
is primarily logical and metaphysical. McTaggart is the most 
striking and incisive of the English commentators on Hegel, by 
virtue of a logical clear-headedness which demands a single pre- 
cise meaning to every statement; and while it is not certain 
that Hegel himself is always most adequately represented when 
too much light is thrown upon his more cryptic utterances, the 
result is at any rate in the interests of straightforwardness, if 
not of spiritual edification, 

McTaggart's interpretation of the dialectic abandons all at- 
tempt to identify the process of thought with that of reality, 
and looks upon it as the search by a finite mind for an adequate 
and consistent concept to cover the experienced facts, — a proc- 
ess which moves by correcting abstract and partial interpreta- 
tions through a reference to the fuller reality that any bit of 
experience will reveal when its implicit structure is worked 
out. A certain lack of spiritual affinity here with the more 
orthodox forms of idealism is emphasized by the sympathetic 
treatment of hedonism, and the defence of individualism 
against an "organic" theory of society, McTaggart's central 
doctrine is that of the ultimateness of finite selves, and the 
consequent need for conceiving reality as a unity of system, and 
not of self-consciousness. The clue to the final nature of the 
Absolute is found in the social experience. Here, in the self as 
member of a society of selves, we have the recognition of an 
objective unity which itself is inwardly unified, a part which 



/. M. E. McTaggart 301 

contains the whole of which it is a part, since the unity is not 
only in, but for, the consciousness of each of the individuals. 
Accordingly we are forced to the conclusion that it is the 
eternal nature of Spirit to be differentiated into finite spirits, 
since an undifferentiated unity would not exist, and no othef 
differentiations have vitality to stand against a perfect unity. 
In calling this conception atheistic, McTaggart means primarily 
to deny personality to existence as a whole; for what we know 
as personality, a consciousness of the non-ego is essential, and 
such a consciousness the Absolute cannot possess, since there is 
nothing outside it from which it can distinguish itself. But he 
equally rejects the supposition that in this society of selves 
there may exist one supreme personality; though so long as we 
distinguish this as finite from the whole of things, — and it is in 
this way that religion commonly conceives of God, — it stands 
on a different footing logically from an Absolute self. 

The acceptance of the reality of the finite relieves McTag- 
gart's system of certain of the difficulties that confront other 
types of absolutism. This however is counterbalanced by the 
intrusion of the further, and unsolved, problem of time and 
change. In general, the empirical plausibility of many of Mc- 
Taggart's arguments implies the temporal self in the ordinary 
human sense. But the dialectic points rather to a "perfect 
and timeless" being, if the self is to be brought into connection 
with a consistent and harmonious whole; and the final puzzle as 
to how a system of eternal selves can give rise to the appearance 
of imperfect selves developing in time, is frankly given up, 
though a number of the difficulties in detail which philosophy 
has to meet are solved by using the distinction. It probably 
is intended as a partial justification of this logical complaisance 
that knowledge itself is not to be regarded as ultimate. In 
the eternal world, both cognition and volition tend to disap- 
pear from the content of reality, to be replaced by the emotion 
of love, as that form of human experience which most ade- 
quately embodies the demand for a perfect unity of self and 



302 English and American Philosophy 

other-self, along with a perfect discrimination of the one from 
the other. And it may be granted that, as an experience, love 
does seem somewhat less repugnant to timelessness; though 
the need of appealing to a self whose nature consists in a bound- 
less love for all other selves is hardly calculated to make more 
evident the identity of the timeless and perfect world with the 
one we actually know. 

Meanwhile it might seem that there are objections to the 
claim that the demands of the Absolute Idea — which requires 
that the whole nature of the social unity should consist in the 
fact that it is for the individuals, and the whole nature of the 
individuals in the fact that the unity is for them ^ — are fulfilled 
cognitively in a community of selves. If we allow, as Mc- 
Taggart seems to do,^ that concretely the cognitive unity in the 
self which knows the world system, and the unity of the system 
which each self knows, are unities in different senses, can we 
really say that the whole nature of the social unity consists in 
the fact that it is for the individuals? The community does 
indeed depend upon an inner recognition of its unity by the 
individual members, for apart from its being recognized in 
consciousness, the social relation would be meaningless. But 
still some basis for the social system must have reality outside 
any possible consciousness or knowledge of it by finite spirits 
— else this knowledge of theirs would not be true knowledge; 
and if so, we lose the right to say that it has no nature except 
for the individuals. If the individuals in their proper character 
did not exist, there could be no relationship between them, as 
there would be no difference between sweet and sour were not 
the qualities themselves first presupposed; but the relationship 
is not for the individuals in the sense of being only a term 
within their consciousness, any more than the relation of differ- 
ence is only inside the related terms. And this implies that, on 
the other hand, we cannot say that the individual's conscious 

^Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, pp. lo ff, 59 £f. 
'Ibid., pp. 14, 2.1;, 62. 



J. M. E. McTaggart 303 

recognition of his harmony with others itself constitutes the 
separate nature of each individual; things which in themselves 
are nothing cannot produce a world by coming into relation. 
The abstract logical content of the cognition of the social sys- 
tem may be — logically — identical with the system that is 
known; but the concrete self, or the concrete experience of 
knowing, is not reducible to mere logical content. 

The only way of escaping the difficulty seems to be by giving 
up the notion of existence altogether, and keeping entirely to 
a logical analysis of the "social" as a concept simply, with- 
out reference to its existential implications. Then we could 
doubtless say, once more, that the relation of selves would not 
be that particular thing, a social imity, were it not for what 
goes on within the consciousness of each individual self. Simi- 
larly the individual might be said to have its social meaning, 
as distinct from its existence, only in terms of its relationships 
to other individuals. But unless social unity is to hang in the 
air, it must find a basis in realities; and these are bound to 
have a nature, and relationships, which the cognitive unity of 
any single self does not constitute, but has to recognize for 
what they are. 

5. A philosophy which also interprets the Absolute as a 
community rather than as a single self, but which differs alike 
in its motivation, in the thoroughgoing transcendentalism of 
its method, and, in terms of content, in the enlargement of the 
spiritual community to include a perfect self, or God, is to 
be found, somewhat sketchily developed, in the American phi- 
losopher G. H. Howison. Howison is impressed by the danger 
which monism threatens to the integrity of ethical freedom and 
responsibility; and it is to save these that he sets out to de- 
velop, on a Kantian basis, an idealistic pluralism. Howison 
accepts the reduction of all existence to minds on the one hand, 
and, on the other, to the items and order of their experiences. 
These phenomenal experiences, as organized by the active forms 
of consciousness, are what we call the physical world of nature, 



304 English and American Philosophy 

whose objectivity, therefore, is not substantive, but social — 
the reference to the universal society of minds as a standard. 
Meanwhile through the recognition by these selves of one an- 
other in their true or noumenal being, as ultimate and self- 
determining, their coexistence constitutes a moral order more 
fundamental than the physical, — an eternal City of God, 
wherein all the members have the equality belonging to their 
common aim of fulfilling one rational ideal. In this community, 
however, one larger Self stands out as the fulfilled type of every 
mind, the eternal perfection of the rational nature which is 
common to all, — a perfection made possible because in him 
alone there is lacking the material of sense that separates finite 
selves from the ideal, and renders necessary the experience of 
striving, out of which the phenomenal world, where evolution 
and causality rule, arises. And by this character which he 
possesses, God constitutes also the living bond of the union 
of finite selves, not as a creator, — no member of the eternal 
republic has any origin in time, and the category of efficient 
causation applies only to phenomena, — but as the Ideal which 
moves through its attractiveness. God rules not by the exer- 
cise of power but solely by light, not by authority but by rea- 
son, not by efficient but by final causation. And through this 
dependence of the causal on the moral world, the barrier left 
by Kant between the practical and the theoretical reason is 
broken down. Our ethical intuition is raised from the realm 
of feeling to that of intelligence; and the ethical first principle 
is shown to be not only itself an act of knowledge, but the 
principle of all knowledge, since it is through this ideal implied 
in a society of free beings that the world of perceptions is 
organized, and real experience separated from illusion. 

6. A similar interest in the integrity of the self, though 
the speculative emphasis is differently placed, is also visible in 
a new turn recently given to the idealistic argument by W. 
E. Hocking. Notwithstanding a strong sympathy with mysti- 
cism, Hocking's interpretation of the religious experience has 



W. E. Hocking 305 

a definitely realistic tone. The need is recognized explicitly 
for an outl5dng and creative reality, beyond the bounds of the 
self, as a requirement of worship, as well as, more incidentally, 
for free creative activity on the part of the finite person; in- 
deed at times the notion of the Absolute seems to be no more 
than an assertion of the presence of absolute validity in knowl- 
edge,^ and to leave us within the precincts of a dualistic theism. 
The central argument of the book, however, is plainly a variant 
of the idealistic tradition. It is to the effect that God is known 
by man directly in immediate sense experience. The argu- 
ment involves two theses in particular, — that sense experience 
is a common ingredient in the lives of different selves, which 
literally coalesce in Nature, and that a necessary aspect of 
our nature experience is the concurrent recognition of 
Other Mind as also knowing the same content. And 
since this Other Mind cannot be that of my human fel- 
lows, whom I recognize as, equally with myself, depend- 
ent upon nature, which does not have to wait for their 
knowing in order to exist, we are forced to identify it with God 
as the universal Knower implicated in all objective knowledge. 
We thus know even our fellow beings only because we first 
know God, since the knowledge of God supplies the whole no- 
tion of "social" experience without whose prior possession our 
inferential recognition of human selves would be impossible. 

The first point here has in certain ways a real advantage over 
the more usual doctrine of the idealists, for which "nature" is 
an ideal construction by means of which various selves, in 
possession of experience essentially private, are able to com- 
municate with one another; for if there is an actual identity of 
sense perception, we have a bridge for passing from self to self 
which the mere logical sameness of an ideal content fails in 
any obvious way to supply. It is true this makes a very doubt- 
ful assumption when it supposes that the primary object of 
knowledge is the sense experience itself; this is the original 
^Meaning of God in Human Experience, pp. 191, 204. 



3o6 English and American Philosophy 

vice of subjectivism, and once in its toils, no way has ever yet 
been found that will quite enable us to escape. It is the other 
part of the argument, however, that calls for special attention. 
The idea of an Other Mind, it is urged, must be at the same 
time an experience of Other Mind, and carry existence with it, 
for the reason that if it were a mere idea, there would be no 
standard by reference to which it could be thus recognized; 
even the idea of a social experience would not be possible, were 
such an experience not at the same time actual.^ 

Now it is possible to see how this might be a valid argument, 
provided we first accept the reduction of the concept of "ob- 
jectivity" to social agreement. We cannot really doubt the 
objectivity of knowledge; and if, accordingly, the objective is 
definable in social terms, if it means only that which other 
minds agree with us in knowing, then the recognition of the 
social, to be possible in idea even, must apparently be a primi- 
tive datum of experience, since, as all philosophy goes to show, 
we cannot achieve the objective by starting from pure sub- 
jectivity. We could, then, have no world at all apart from the 
sense of not being alone in knowing this world, and God, as 
the perpetual "sustainer of universality" in our judgments, 
must be somehow present in experience from the beginning.^ 
This however is only a dialectical triumph unless it can pre- 
suppose an acceptance of the original definition; and the 
necessity for this has already been seen to be debatable. If 
we allow it possible that the object of perception may exist in- 
dependently of my knowing it, rather than as an element of 
experienced content, there is no reason why I might not start 
with a solitary recognition of this object as my nature experi- 
ence, or why the "sense of reality" might not arise from an 
active commerce with a physical environment, rather than from 
an intellectual perception of "shared" ideas. It may very well 
be that I carry over to the natural agent from the start some 
of the characteristics that later are distinguished as belonging 
^Ibid., pp. 274 ff. 'IbU., pp. 281, 288. 



W. E. Hocking 307 

to a self; but this is very different from viewing it as known by 
a self, and only thus as getting objectified at all. 

In a sense it may still be admitted that we must first have 
something that can be called a social experience before we can 
reproduce it in idea; but we cannot assume by definition that 
a social experience is bound to include the actual experienced 
presence of a further self. We have to look to the facts to 
see what it actually does mean; and what the facts seem to 
suggest is, simply, the cognitive acceptance of a socius not 
directly experienced, but only implied in ideal terms. And 
this calls attention to a point of difficulty in Hocking's posi- 
tion; even supposing his argument for a fellow- Knower to be 
allowed, the justification nevertheless is doubtful for talking 
of an "experience" of this Other Mind. Granting the existence 
of a communistic society which has a common property in sense 
experiences, still the essential Self, the living center, that which 
knows, is something other than its possessions, and exercises 
an activity which at best enters into my life only in the shape 
of its results. And there seems no more possibility therefore 
of my "experiencing" in an immediate way another self in the 
case of God, — though I might have experiences that lead to a 
direct recognition or idea of him without the use of conscious 
inference, — than in the case of the human selves where it is 
explicitly denied, unless indeed the fact be that I myself create 
both myself and nature through a mystical identification with 
the creative thought of God. And then that integrity of the 
self which Hocking wishes to maintain would disappear. 

7. What Hocking calls a Social Realism, with an absolutis- 
tic background, has two further representatives of importance, 
whose philosophical results are rather closely identified. Tech- 
nically there might be some objection to dealing with the first 
of these in connection Avith the German influence. In episte- 
mology, Simon S. Laurie seems at first sight to belong to the 
tradition of Scottish dualism, and his earliest book, Meta- 
physica Nova et Vetusta, Is expressly a defence of "natural 



3o8 English and American Philosophy 

realism." Even in the lower levels 6i experience, — in sensa- 
tion, and in that synoptic grouping of sense impressions which 
he distinguishes by the name of Attuition, — Laurie finds an 
implicit dualism of feeling and felt Other; there is a dim 
awareness of the presence of actual Being, different from any 
possible logical predicate. The objective categories already 
implicitly present in attuited objects are not therefore, as in 
Kant, to be regarded as furnished by the subject; they are 
found in, not imposed on, phenomena. There is no good ground 
for doubting that we are here brought into contact with the 
real structure of things; why should we not accept the testi- 
mony of experience, rather than put it on the defensive? The 
burden of proof lies with him who would question this; we are 
entitled to start with the assumption of a harmony between 
the conscious and the non-conscious, since it is absurd to sup- 
pose that the scheme of creation turns out to be a fiasco just 
when it reaches its highest stage in finite reason. 

These categories begin to be explicit in Perception, which 
is the elementary form of Reason. The essence of Reason 
is active Will, of which the categories are the ''form." While 
in sensation the Object seizes the Subject as it were, and con- 
sciousness is relatively passive, in Reason the Subject itself 
goes out and seizes the sensed Object. And in this way it 
effects knowledge in the distinctive sense, through an act of 
affirmation, or judgment of identity, which arrests the flux 
of phenomena through the conscious discrimination of the 
original felt datum as not other things but just itself, and so 
turns it into a more or less permanent object of consciousness. 
At the same time it makes explicit the Subject also, which be- 
fore was likewise only felt, and relates the object to the unity 
of the conscious self. Rational Judgment is the explicit enun- 
ciation of this original act which constitutes Perception, and 
of the categories which it involves. It is the distinctive work 
of Reason, no longer simply accepting the collocations and 
sequences of the animal experience, to pass, through analysis, 



S. S. Laurie 309 

from a world, real indeed but not rationally coherent, to the 
Actual, as the synthesis of a systematic unity in knowledge. 

So far epistemology. When however Laurie turns to meta- 
physics, it appears that this dualism is only relative, and is sub- 
ordinated to a Pluralistic Monism, in which once more the at- 
tempt is made to accomodate the reality of the finite to the all- 
comprehensive unity of an Absolute Life. For it is the ex- 
planation of this power of Reason to grasp reality, that it is 
itself a pulse of the Infinite Reason in which we live and 
move and have our being. God lives in the act of revealing him- 
self in and to finite selves. Nature forming the medium of this 
revelation; he is the One Being in which and out of which 
all differences arise, including even the supreme opposition of 
Subject and Object. True knowledge of the world is possible 
because man is really one with Nature; he is Nature becoming 
conscious in and through its highest product. He finds the 
reason-process in the universe because he is himself a con- 
scious reason-process, and in organic continuity with the whole; 
raised to self-identity and self-affirmation, he is able to read 
and interpret the total record through the "form" of this 
spiritual movement which is a gift of the divine Reason in him. 
At the same time we are not to forget that the pluralism is also 
real. The act of reason by which we realize the divine purpose 
through coming to know God, is in each man a unique center 
of energy; man is not a mere passive instrument, and the Ab- 
solute can be realized in the whole only by being realized in 
each. Laurie struggles heroically with this conception of a 
"dependent independence," but to very little purpose; for we 
are paying ourselves with words when we profess to explain the 
puzzling facts of finiteness by an appeal to the "eternal fact 
of Negation as necessary moment in Absolute Being," or the 
nature of the individual as the "thinking of God caught in the 
Negation." ^ 

8. It is a very similar solution that we find, in closer con- 
* Synthetica, Vol. II, pp. 65, 68. 



3IO English and American Philosophy 

nection with the main movement of Idealism, and expressed 
with a lucidity in striking contrast with Laurie's highly tech- 
nical and difficult phraseology, in the maturer philosophy of 
Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison. Some of Pringle-Pattison's 
earlier writings might easily give the impression of a break 
with the traditional tenets of the idealistic school. His He- 
geUanism and Personality, in particular, contains one of the 
most effective of the criticisms of Hegel's logical monism, with 
its absorption of finite selves in the one comprehensive Self; 
and elsewhere the dualistic claims involved in human knowing 
are clearly recognized, in opposition to the evasions of the 
orthodox idealistic epistemology. It becomes evident however 
in his latest volume, The Idea of God, that this is to be taken 
as a correction of absolutism, rather than its repudiation. The 
argument of the book proceeds from the need of utilizing the 
life of ideal values to interpret reality, instead of reducing 
reality to terms of the lower and mechanical categories ; but it is 
critical of the disposition to interpret such an argument by 
reference to the claims of particular emotional needs of man's 
nature. This last is apt to take the shape of a mistaken oppo- 
sition between the spiritual life and science, and of a dangerous 
disparagement of the scientific categories; the life of spirit 
ought rather to be regarded as a higher level of that same reality 
which first meets us in nature. So again on the side of man's 
relation to a higher Being. It is the validity of objective values, 
not the rights of special instincts, that is decisive here; for a 
true philosophy, the center of gravity is not in the claims of 
the individual, but in God as revealing himself to man, and 
admitting him to participation in a universal and over-indi- 
vidual process. 

Man, then, is an organic part of the continuity of nature, 
which only for this reason can he truly know; and the whole 
evolutionary process is the immanent life of an Absolute which 
uses nature as a means of^^self-revelation to finite beings, and 



'A. Seth Pringle-Pattison 311 

whose existence is alike revealed in, and constituted by, the facts 
of human striving through which strength of moral fibre is 
attained. It is revealed, that is, as the truth at this particular 
level, into which preceding stages have been taken up; we 
cannot stop with humanity however as our highest concept, 
since human life clearly finds its completion in a source that 
transcends it. From this eternal source all that is real de- 
rives its being. We are neither to suppose then, with natural- 
ism, that higher forms of reality can be explained away in 
terms of the lower, nor, with certain more recent pluralistic 
philosophies, that literal novelties appear in the course of de- 
velopment, which in no sense were real before. In the con- 
tinuity of the universal process new differences emerge which 
disclose the inadequacy of the categories of a previous level 
for interpreting the world ; but they are progressive revelations, 
not additions. The notion of sheer accretions to the sum of 
reality, successive spurts of something out of nothing, is un- 
thinkable. Meanwhile we are not to regard God as realized 
somehow independently of his developing purpose in the world, 
whether at the end of the time process, or beyond it altogether. 
God is the very process itself, present in the world as its 
Redeemer in an eternal act of self-realization through the giving 
of himself to others, — an act in which time is transcended, and 
the future is equally implicated with the past and present. 

No English defender of absolutism has shown a more bal- 
anced feeling than Pringle-Pattison for the diverse elements 
that enter into the philosophical problem; and if the result 
is still not altogether convincing, it is possible this may be 
bound up in the very nature of an effort to construct by thought 
an object of speculative knowledge which goes beyond any pos- 
sibility of imaginative realization. For it has in the end to 
be admitted that for the kow of God's connection alike with 
the physical world and with the finite selves of whom he is 
the sustaining life, for the relation of eternity to time and 



312 English and American Philosophy 

progress, for all the problems that are most ultimate, in fact, 
we have nothing in experience to give us any real clue.^ Of 
the very nature of the Absolute, from the standpoint of its own 
self-knowledge, we can say nothing, not even that it is personal ; 
in Laurie's phrase, all specific predicates are in reality, not of 
it. And the claim that we have met the charge of scepticism 
and phenomenalism by insisting that our truth is true jor us, 
as the highest which we possess, and is to be held as true until 
it is superseded, is surely an evasion. None but the most 
reckless sceptic has ever denied that practically we ought to 
stick to the most satisfying knowledge we can get. What 
phenomenalism asserts is, that there exists an outlook upon 
reality, and this the only ultimately real one, which we not 
only cannot attain, but which we are certain is different from 
our own; and this is where the present theory leaves us also. 
Nor is it clear that so transcendent a reality will meet the 
needs of religion any more than those of understanding. There 
are difficulties in plenty, doubtless, in the alternative which 
Pringle-Pattison rejects; the notion of God as a Self in a com- 
munity of selves, and so as less than the whole sum of existing 
things, raises questions that are hard to meet. But the dif- 
ficulties are at least in terms of logic, and not of valuation. 
Unless our whole social experience be a false guide, a God who 
existed as a socius would in so far show an actual increment 
of ethical, if not of metaphysical worth; to say nothing of the 
fact that he would be in essence knowable, and not a mere 
condition or fount of knowledge. 

No more satisfactory is the theory of Nature, conceived 
as a form of reality striving toward self-consciousness, and 
attaining in man an organ through which it beholds and enjoys 
itself.^ If this means that God himself first comes to con- 
sciousness in man, its value for religion is dubious; and if 
it means that man is nothing but the physical organism, and, 

*Cf. The Idea of God, pp. 202, 285, 293, 359, 364, 378, 390-1. 
^ Ibid., pp. Ill, IIS, 127. 



A. Seth Pringle-Pattison 313 

through the organism, the physical universe, blossoming into 
a self-awareness, it seems more poetic than intelligible. The 
theory of the soul as the entelechy of the body is not a new 
one; but no one has ever taken a step toward carrying through 
its application to the plain differences of psychical and physical 
content in the concrete. It conveys a definite meaning to 
say that the world without man would not be complete, in that 
man must be added to the sum of things — other than himself 
— before the possibilities of existence are exhausted; or that 
the being of things passes into consciousness, meaning that 
their ideal essence is taken up into human knowledge; or that 
God elicits out of the common fund of externality a new world 
of appreciation and spiritual communion, if this means that 
the natural world is the theatre of human action, in which men 
find ideally — not, again, by actual transmutation of existence 
— some of the material of social intercourse; or that the world 
seems to take on added richness as we develop faculties to 
apprehend it, in the sense that it reveals new relationships to 
us, and new possibilities of use. But none of these things 
lend any authority to such a claim as this, that music, for 
example, is there in the cosmic system known to me, as well 
as here in me, though it has to await me in order to realize its 
own truth in the system.^ The possibility of music must of 
course be present; and if all possibilities are eternally realized, 
so somehow music must be actually present too. And were 
matter to be taken, not as a stage in God's self-realization, but 
as an imperfect rendering of God's present life due to our 
limitations of knowledge, we might have the right to claim that 
our growth in human appreciations is a revelation, rather than 
a subjective addition. But then it would not be objects them- 
selves that develop into fuller truth in us, but human conscious- 
ness that arrives at a fuller knowledge of God, — thereby mak- 
ing no doubt its social contribution to the wealth of being; 
and matter becomes only a medium for this revelation. And to 
* Laurie, Synthetica, Vol. I, p. ii8. 



314 English and American Philosophy 

identify, instead, the actual life of God with the potentialities 
of nature as itself evolving into man, at least is only possible 
through a faith in the unreality of Time which confounds all 
our human attempts at clear analysis, and leaves "matter" 
quite out of relation to our everyday conceptions of it. 



CHAPTER VI 
PERSONAL IDEALISM, PANPSYCHISM AND REALISM 

§ I. Personality and Religion. Personal Idealism 

I. In comparison with the self-confidence and relative soli- 
darity of the absolute idealists, and their highly articulated 
and comprehensive program, other tendencies in the latter part 
of the nineteenth century run the risk of appearing chaotic 
and lacking in prestige. It was not until the appearance of 
two rival philosophies, — first pragmatism, and later neo- 
realism, — showing something of the same unity of logical 
technique that lends itself to enthusiastic discipleship and the 
founding of a school, and marked by an originality of stand- 
point which could not be waved aside as mere outgrown tra- 
ditionalism, that the vogue of absolutism was seriously im- 
perilled. Nevertheless there was a very considerable amount 
of contemporaneous thinking going on to which the idealists, 
in their critical preoccupation with the empiricism of Locke 
and Hume, and their conviction that Germany had at last hit 
upon the one true method in philosophy, were inclined to do 
something less than justice. Most of this also was influenced 
in some measure by Kant. But in the main it had more 
realistic sources, in part the Scottish philosophy of Common 
Sense, in part the older English tradition modified by recent 
advances of science, and partly also foreign-grown products 
such as, in particular, the idealistic realism of Lotze. 

The confused cross-currents that are present here will neces- 
sarily lead to some degree of arbitrariness in any attempt at a 

315 



3i6 English and American Philosophy 

brief survey; but certain rough generalizations can be made. 
The representatives of the various tendencies agree in rejecting 
the epistemology of absolutism, and for the most part are 
realists in knowledge; they accept some sort of dualism be- 
tween thought and things, such that the passage from one to 
the other still constitutes for them a problem. In their on- 
tology they differ more widely. On the one hand, especially 
where the scientific interest is pronounced, there appears some 
more or less thoroughgoing form of physical realism, which at- 
tempts to find a more solid foundation for scientific knowl- 
edge than the sensationalism of the earlier empiricists sup- 
plies. Much more characteristic of the period, however, is 
an idealistic or quasi-idealistic realism having its source in 
religious and ethical, rather than in naturalistic motives. Here, 
instead of connecting ideal values with an Absolute, there is a 
general disposition to make the finite person the center of 
philosophy, using this as a clue for interpreting, more com- 
monly in a theistic sense, the fundamental nature of things. 

This interest in the self shows three closely related aspects, 
which enter into what is supposed to be its speculative value. 
First, there is the traditional interest of theism, which wishes 
to use human personality as a clue, and read it into the ulti- 
mate nature of existence. Tied up with religion also, though 
based as well on simpler human demands, is the desire to 
find the universe a permanent abiding-place for man, and not 
a mere stage on which he plays a transient earthly role. Finally, 
and most important philosophically, there is the determination 
to conceive reality in such a way that the ideal values, moral 
and otherwise, which attach to human life and human nature, 
may be felt to be solidly grounded, and not the precarious by- 
products of an impersonal evolution. All of these motives 
converge in one polemical purpose — to overthrow that system 
of scientific naturalism by which the claims of religion, im- 
mortality, and conscience, have appeared to so many modem 
thinkers to be jeopardized. 



Tennyson 317 

2. The emotional force back of such an endeavor gets a 
highly characteristic expression in the poetry of Alfred Tenny- 
son. It has been one clear tendency of scientific thought to 
depreciate the importance of man and his desires in the uni- 
verse. We are but so many transient products of a great 
cosmic process, utterly inconsequential, except to ourselves, in 
the vast stretch of law-abiding phenomena. We work for ends; 
we have various preferences for this thing over that, to which 
we give such names as right, justice, beauty; we are concerned 
with our own destinies, and with interests, religious interests 
for example, with which these seem to us bound up. But 
science does not speak of ends at all. It substitutes impersonal 
laws for the notion of God and religion, the species for the in- 
dividual, scientific understanding for poetry and emotional 
aspiration. As we trace life back further and further into the 
past, all those qualities that we call human and moral gradually 
disappear, until we can scarcely avoid putting to ourselves the 
question, Have the ideals that give worth to human experience, 
rooted as they are in bestiality and carnage, any ultimate 
validity at all, or are they not mere delusions when looked at 
in their larger context? 

To all that this tendency implies, Tennyson found his own 
convictions profoundly opposed. For him, the special locus 
of the meaning and significance of experience is just the fact 
of personal human relationships, which bind man with his 
fellow man, and show themselves on the side of feeling in 
sympathy and human love. And in personality he finds not 
only the presupposition necessary for the maintenance of moral 
values, but the one irreducible core of reality and fact which 
remains to us philosophically amid the uncertainties and il- 
lusions of experience, "You may tell me that my hand and 
my foot are only imaginary symbols of my existence — I could 
believe you; but you never, never can convince me that the / 
is not an eternal Reality, and that the Spiritual is not the true 
and real part of me." And in the certainty of this his own 



3i8 English and American Philosophy 

spiritual reality, Tennyson discovers a way of escape from 
the unsatisfactoriness incident to a naturalistic universe. 
Briefly, it is the solution of faith, — a faith resting upon a lively 
conviction that certain things are so important that they give 
us a right to hold to them whatever the intellectual temptation 
to set them aside. A true philosophy bids us look not to science 
and what is, but to the ideals that have their root in blind 
gropings after what is higher and better than anything yet 
realized in the world. The interpretation of life lies in this 
constant warfare between the baseness in our blood which is 
the heritage of an animal past, and the adumbrations of a final 
victory when our true nature shall have come into its own. Such 
a goal is the object of faith and not of knowledge, because it 
has not yet appeared fully in the realm of fact. But it is the 
superiority of man over the brute that he can thus act by 
faith; though facts seem to bear him down, he can "faintly 
trust the larger hope," and so be put on his way to its realiza- 
tion. All morality and religion consist in not allowing ourselves 
to be overborne by the pressure of the apparent nature of things, 
to be so enchained to so-called facts that we are blind to their 
future promise. And guided by this inner light, the world 
which to science is only the outcome of mechanical law be- 
comes the imperfect expression of a divine purpose; and man, 
instead of a chance product of impersonal forces, shows himself 
the inheritor of an eternal destiny, and the possessor of an 
absolute value in the scheme of things. 

For the rest, if we ask for a more positive account of this 
reality, we can expect no clear answer; indeed we know it 
more truly when we do not try to subject it to our finite 
measurement. We may be confident that somehow there is 
a good meaning to life which will secure the interest that man 
calls spiritual, that through the ages one increasing purpose 
runs with which man progressively can cooperate and so rea- 
lize his own ends. But what God is we cannot hope to set 
down in human words. Our truest knowledge comes in those 



Tennyson 319 

moments of mystical insight when we cease trying to argue 
and prove directly, and pass, by an intimate experience of 
feeling, from doubt to certitude. Meanwhile this fundamental 
ground of reality, though it is above our human comprehen- 
sion, we are not to forget that we can rise to only by starting 
from ourselves; and we are not to let go our hold therefore 
on this positive content, as at least truer than blank igno- 
rance. Nor may God override the human personalities from 
which originate all our conceptions of value. Tennyson insists 
always upon the intimacy of God's relation to man. But while 
he would remove Nature as a barrier, and interpret it as the 
immediate symbol or expression of an immanent divine Power, 
man still retains his integrity: 

Dark is the world to thee: thyself art the reason why; 

For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel "I am I?" 

3, In a more logically exacting form, the "faith philosophy" 
of Tennyson comes to play an increasingly important part in 
the development of recent English philosophy outside the 
range of naturalism and of absolutism. One not inconsider- 
able force in this direction is to be found in the philosophical 
teaching of Alexander Campbell Fraser, Hamilton's successor 
in the chair of philosophj'- at Edinburgh. At the outset an 
adherent of the Scottish school, the realistic motive is in 
Fraser appreciably modified by Berkeley's influence — the later 
Berkeley more particularly. While his doctrine is not wholly 
unambiguous, on the whole he seems disposed to regard the 
natural world as constructed out of sense perception by the 
indwelling presence of the divine Reason; in any case, it is not 
to be taken as self-contained and independent, but as a mani- 
festation of God's active nature, whose essence lies in its 
capacity to reveal God to man. It is perhaps on principle that 
Fraser refuses to define himself very explicitly here, since a 
certain distrust of the powers of the metaphysical intellect 
is the most distinctive feature of his philosophical point of view. 



320 English and American Philosophy 

Not only as against a naturalistic absorption in phenomena, 
but in opposition to an arrogant claim to complete speculative 
knowledge, he stands for the "venture of faith," though of a 
faith critically verified by reflection. While we must recognize 
that there is perfect Reason in the world corresponding to 
man's cognitive efforts, — since otherwise we could not find, as 
within limits we do find, the world interpretable, — yet at best 
our finite reason is only very tentative and groping. It is 
guided not by full insight, but by the emotional assurance of 
a fundamental Goodness in the universe which will not put us 
to moral confusion; indeed such moral trustworthiness is all 
that gives us any right to retain our confidence that even the 
scientific order which we trace among phenomena will not fail 
us. 

4. The same mode of vindicating human interests that rest 
on faith or feeling, pressed still further in the direction of a 
scepticism of the logical instrument, is adopted with much dia- 
lectical skill and literary effectiveness by Arthur J. Balfour. 
Balfour directs his efforts mainly against naturalism, though 
more incidentally he pays his respects also to Idealism and 
its claims to supply the basis for a logically stable and demon- 
strative metaphysics. The indictment of naturalism is twofold. 
In the first place, a naturalistic origin for our aesthetic and 
moral and religious convictions is of a sort to leave them with- 
out any reasonable foundation. The value of our most valu- 
able beliefs is lost if they have no more congruous source than 
the blind transformations of physical energy. They become 
mere chance episodes in the welter of meaningless events; and 
the recognition of this is certain in the end to sap their vitality. 
In point of fact, the principle of natural selection has so far 
not been successful in making out its case as a matter of 
natural history even, since it is just in the instances where we 
find great intrinsic, as opposed to instrumental worth, — the 
sense of beauty, for example, — that the direct effect of selec- 
tion is to all appearance negligible. 



A. J. Balfour 321 

But now also — and this is logically fatal as well — the same 
conclusion applies even to "truth." No philosophy can be 
truly consistent without some correspondence between the ac- 
cepted value of results and the accepted theory of causes; and 
a creed therefore contradicts itself which sets, as naturalism 
does, a high value on true beliefs, and at the same time holds 
a theory as to the ultimate origin of beliefs which suggests 
their falsity. For if our faculties of belief are the chance out- 
come of natural selection due to the insistent needs of physical 
life, there is not the least probability that an instrument will 
in this way have been created fitted for exploring the secrets 
of the universe, and for supplying a guarantee to those larger 
considerations, indifferent to survival needs, on which a total 
world view — and this includes the world view of the phenome- 
nalist — depends. Actually, our beliefs rest in large degree, 
not on scientific proof, but on authority — by which is meant 
not definite authorities cissigned as a reason for believing, but 
the alogical convictions which we accepted in the first place, 
and continue to hold, without attempting to give reasons for 
them at all; the whole human race, including the philosopher, 
lives by faith, if by this we mean conviction apart from and in 
excess of evidence. To understand belief we have to take 
account not merely of premises and their conclusions, but of 
needs and their satisfactions; and there is no reason whatever 
for limiting this to purely material needs. The true function 
of reason is the incidental one of correcting here and there our 
opinions in detail, while still always presupposing such an 
alogical background. It perhaps is worth noting here that 
when he calls belief "non-rational," Balfour is presupposing one 
particular ideal of reason only; he does not consider the pos- 
sibility that "rationality" might itself be defined in terms of 
the mutual support which beliefs render one another, without 
demanding for them individually any demonstrable finality. 
As to more positive philosophical conclusions, Balfour argues 
that, while the evidence can never be compulsory, an intelligent 



322 English and American Philosophy 

guidance of the world-process, such as theism presupposes, 
makes at any rate more understandable the claim alike of truth, 
and of feeling, to connect us with reality; it helps provide an 
intelligible explanation of the good fortune which has made 
natural causes which are not reasons, issue in what is by 
hj^othesis a rational system. 

5. It would be useless to attempt to follow out with any- 
thing like completeness the role of faith in contemporary phi- 
losophy, since it is present, with varying degrees of emphasis, 
wherever "voluntarism" has attempted to supplant "intel- 
lectualism." Comparable in point of literary skill with Bal- 
four's work, is W. H. Mallock's plausibly written volume Is 
Life Worth Living? which attacks naturalism from a stand- 
point of faith in ecclesiastical authority, and tries to show that 
apart from supernaturalism, ethical as well as religious con- 
victions lose their support, and are destined to extinction. 
Worth noting for a degree of novelty in the method of ap- 
proach, is a recent book also by W. R. Sorley. Here the argu- 
ment starts from the need of overcoming the empirical discord 
between nature and morality, the reign of scientific law and 
the objectivity of values; and it holds that the only way to 
interpret the world of nature successfully as a consistent part 
of the same rational universe with the realm of values, is to 
regard it as an instrument for the discovery and production 
of values by finite minds. The truest account of reality is, ac- 
cordingly, in terms of a purposive system in which nature is the 
medium of moralization, and human selves are free agents who 
work out the unity of the universal purpose in achieving their 
own perfection. Another book, which calls attention to the 
wide philosophic range of a humanistic appeal to interests and 
values for the establishing of truth, is a cooperative volume 
called Personal Idealism, emanating from a group of Oxford 
men. Here we find ranged together the voluntaristic psy- 
chology of G. F. Stout, the Berkeleian theism of Hastings 
Rashdall, the pragmatism of F. C. S. Schiller and Henry Sturt, 



John Grote 323 

and the spiritualistic idealism of Boyce Gibson, the trans- 
lator and popularizer of Eucken. 

6. Besides furnishing, from the resources of its emotional 
life, the impulse to belief, and the value content of experience, 
the self may also be utilized to supply the categories in terms 
of which to think intellectually the nature of the world; and 
such an attempt to interpret the forms of thought employed 
by the older theistic argument, as themselves understandable 
only when we take them as functions within the unity of a 
personal life, — an attempt largely influenced by Kant, — is 
characteristic of the religious philosophy of recent years. 
Absolutism of course may, and does, adopt a similar program, 
very explicitly in the case of Green ; but the logic of absolutism 
has nevertheless been pretty clearly in the direction of a more 
impersonal construction, and the substitution of Mind, or Spirit, 
or Experience, for the "self" concept. An anticipation of this 
"personalism" is to be found in a volume, not as well known 
as its ability deserves, by 'John Grote, a brother of the his- 
torian, who held the chair of moral philosophy at Cambridge 
from 1855 to 1866. Grote's book, which is suggestive rather 
than systematic, is primarily a criticism of phenomenalism, in 
opposition to which he would justify our right to investigate 
the nature of things, — what they are, as against merely what 
they do. The background for the criticism is an epistemology 
which is influenced by Kant, but which repudiates Kant's 
agnosticism. The defect of scientific phenomenalism lies in its 
disposition to take as it stands the world that has already been 
constructed in knowledge, and to overlook the»fact that there 
can be no reality, for us at least, except as it is interpreted in 
connection with its knowability. And if known, it must in so 
far be "anthropomorphic." Knowledge presupposes the activity 
of the mind, — a mind that is actual, and neither a mere phe- 
nomenon, nor yet a formal abstraction, — in projecting itself 
into the confusion of sense data, and imposing its categories 
on nature. It does this not in any final and a priori way, but 



324 English and American Philosophy 

experimentally, through a self-correcting process, which, how- 
ever, leaves us a rational ground for the confidence that our 
interpretative categories are really present in reality itself; we 
feel the cognitive act, that is, not as a creation, but as a recog- 
nition — the meeting with a Mind already there. Knowledge 
accordingly is the attributing, to what we are conscious of as 
different from ourselves, of that which is m ourselves; thus the 
fundamental notion of unity, for example, implied in the con- 
cept of a "thing," is not itself phenomenal, but is the pro- 
jection of ourselves, and of the unity of end that characterizes 
a self, into the mass of phenomenal data. In the same 'way 
Grote criticizes the positivistic conception of the "ought," and 
of "history" as the source of our ideals; for the ideal, we must 
look again to man's inner nature and demands. 

7. The emphasis on the self as a source of the categories 
for rendering reality intelligible, as well as supplying inner 
motives for belief, is present, as has been said, in most of the 
recent philosophy of theism. Such a theistic idealism, which 
aims in one way or another to get rid of the independent and 
alien role of matter, and reduce all reality to a "commerce of 
minds," is most fully elaborated in the systematic writings of 
the American philosophers G. T. Ladd and B. P. Bowne. 
Among other recent theists are A. T. Ormond, James Lind- 
say, and George Galloway. A theistic argument starting this 
time from a Berkeleian basis, — that of Hastings Rashdall, — 
is deserving of notice for its explicit recognition of what is of 
course a corollary of any philosophy of this type — the exis- 
tential limitation or finiteness of God, — and for its endeavor 
to qualify such a concept properly, and defend it against the 
religious claims of Absolutism. In a more extreme form this 
doctrine of a finite God had previously been urged in an early 
work of the pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller; and very recently, it 
has attracted wide attention through its adoption by the nov- 
elist H. G. Wells. Wells' defence of the conception, as alone 
having true religious value, is much in the spirit of J. S. Mill; 



Panpsychism 325 

it finds the needs of religion satisfied by a God who is frankly 
the militant leader of men in a campaign against evil and suf- 
fering, and who has no creative responsibility for the back- 
lying world of Veiled Being, in which evil is so real and so 
burdensome a fact. 

§ 2. Panpsychism 

I. Alongside theistic idealism and personalism with its — for 
the most part — religious interest, and at times combining with 
this, is another idealistic tendency of considerable importance 
in recent philosophy, whose motive is more distinctly specu- 
lative. "Panpsychism" is a theory which has its source in the 
first instance in an attempt to account for the relationship of 
mind and body, without presupposing two separate and inter- 
acting entities. As such it has found wide acceptance, not only 
for the reason that a causal relation between alien forms of 
reality has seemed difficult to understand, but, more especially, 
because interaction appears to break in upon the continuity 
of physical law. Among the scientists, accordingly, some theory 
of "parallelism" as a solution of the mind-body problem began 
early to be adopted as the most plausible working h3^othesis. 
Frequently this professed to be nothing more than a methodo- 
logical assumption, further metaphysical questions being left 
unconsidered. But where the ultimate rationale of the situ- 
ation was made an object of investigation at all, it was found 
almost inevitably to lead beyond the mere empirical connec- 
tion of consciousness with the particular facts of nervous struc- 
ture, to the supposition'of a more far-reaching correspondence. 
Such a speculative theory might thereupon take one of two 
general forms. For the first, mind and matter are held to be 
"aspects" of a single reality, a basis of unity being postulated 
in a more ultimate substance whose essence is beyond our 
knowledge. This is a theory already met with more than once 
among the philosophers of naturalism; a further instance, with 



326 English and American Philosophy 

a religious bias, is a volume by J. A. Picton called the Mystery 
of Matter, in which the conception of an ultimate reality with 
diverse manifestations receives a quasi-spiritualistic interpre- 
tation to which the writer* gives the name of Christian Pan- 
theism. The second form is the one adopted by Clifford in 
his mind-stuff theory, and more vaguely anticipated by Alfred 
Barratt; this looks upon the psychical as itself the sole reality, 
while matter now becomes the appearance that mind presents 
to an outside observer. 

2. Among psychologists, in particular, this last conception 
has found a rather wide acceptance. Of its more romantic 
possibilities, though in this case from a biological rather than 
a psychological starting point, Samuel Butler furnishes an 
example. Butler's doctrine originates as an attempt to supplant 
Darwin's theory of natural selection by the notion of an inner 
teleology; and it rests upon two main theses — the literal iden- 
tity of offspring with parent, and the reduction of instinct and 
habit to a persisting memory, becoming unconscious in pro- 
portion as it gains efficiency, of actions performed by the 
organism in the person of its forefathers. In this way each 
new individual is enabled to manufacture the organs which 
it needs, essentially as it manufactures mechanical tools, — 
which last are, indeed, nothing but extensions of the human 
organs beyond the confines of the body. Butler goes on to draw 
the conclusion that what we know as an individual is, on the one 
hand, composed of smaller cell-minds, while also in the other 
direction it is a particle in a wider life-process which animates 
the world, this world-God in turn entering into a still more 
inclusive, though to us an unknown, Deity. At first Butler 
had limited conscious memory to the organic world; but in 
his later books the limitation is withdrawn, and every atom 
of matter without exception is endowed with life and memory. 

3. The evident possibilities which panpsychism holds out 
for a religious philosophy, suggested in Butler's metaphysics, 
have already appeared in connection with absolute idealism, 



James Hinton 327 

particularly in the treatment which it receives from Royce. 
An interesting variant of this religious interpretation is to be 
found in the writings of James Hinton, which lie on the border 
line between philosophy and literature. Hinton accepts, on a 
certain level, the right of phenomenalism to protest against 
the intrusion of doubtfully scientific forces and concepts; the 
remedy is not to dispute the claims of a mechanistic science 
in its own sphere, but to transform this world of science as a 
whole by a spiritual reinterpretation. The peculiarity of Hin- 
ton's doctrine lies in the particular explanation given for the 
fact that reality thus reveals itself to us under the aspect of 
phenomena. Phenomenal matter is dead, inert; it shows 
nothing of that spontaneous activity which we are bound to 
conceive as belonging to true Being. But instead of looking 
for the source of this inertness in nature itself, we should re- 
verse the process; if reality in its true being cannot be inert, 
then the inertness which characterizes it to man's consciousness 
must be due to his own state and condition. We view the world 
as physical, only because of a defect in ourselves which modi- 
fies our perception; some of the constituents of reality which 
make it real have dropped out in our apprehension of it. And 
these constituents are reinstated when we turn from the in- 
tellect to the organs of moral and spiritual knowledge — to 
conscience and emotion; to rise to true Being, to the Absolute, 
to God the perfect unity of Life and Love, we have only to 
correct the subjective fault to which the phenomenal is due. 
Man has thus made matter by his sin, his selfishness. We see 
matter because only love can see love; wherever there is not- 
love, there is matter. So even of the self as an individual. 
Persons are states of fallen humanity; it is only as material 
that men are many and separate, and redemption means the 
overcoming of the separation of man from his fellow man and 
God by the path of love and self-sacrifice. 

4. Another and more technical philosopher, in whom a 
panpsychist metaphysics is allied, however, with a scientific 



328 English and American Philosophy 

rather than a religious interest, is Carveth Read. For Read 
also we come in direct contact with the ultimately real only 
in immediate consciousness; that portion of empirical reality 
which extends beyond consciousness — the external world which 
includes our own bodies — is not thus ultimate, but represents 
reality in the form of a system of phenomena which conscious- 
ness constructs. Behind such appearances, however, we are 
forced for various reasons to believe that a transcendent reality 
exists, more particularly because it is needed to account for 
changes in phenomena in the absence of any known percipient, 
and for our conviction that a single external world is common 
to different men. This wider reality we may reasonably con- 
jecture is in its nature like the piece of it which we directly 
know; for if consciousness were not originally a factor in all 
existence, its beginnings would, on the principle of continuity, 
be impossible to account for. The entire nature of existence 
cannot indeed be fully expressed by consciousness; there is a 
transcendent being which is conscious, or whose activity con- 
sciousness represents. But some knowledge of this existence 
we possess, partly from the laws of phenomena which represent 
it objectively, and partly from the laws of that self-conscious- 
ness which is not a phenomenon, but the reality itself sub- 
jectively conditioned. Since all reality is conscious, there is 
nothing to prevent our supposing that sensational qualities, 
even secondary qualities, reveal to us in some measure how 
reality itself actually jeels; but the resemblance that true cog- 
nition presupposes is more safely to be looked for, for scientific 
purposes at any rate, in ultimate relations, or "forms" of con- 
sciousness, — notably succession, coexistence, change, and order 
of change. In evolutionary terms, knowledge may be regarded 
as a function of nature whereby she comes to an awareness 
of the characters that constitute her essence. 

5. On the whole, the most usual, and perhaps the most 
natural affiliation of panpsychism, has been with the hy- 
pothesis of a unitary and all-embracing world consciousness. 



James Ward 329 

This is not a logical necessity however; panpsychism may be 
monadistic, as in Leibniz, and find the spiritual reality of the 
world of nature in personal beings analogous to the human 
self, or it may indeed be atomistic, as in the case of Clifford, 
and subordinate the nature of the self, whether human or 
divine, to its constituent elements of mind-stuff. And in its 
recent career both of these tendencies are ably represented, the 
former in particular by James 'Ward,^ the latter by C. A. 
Strong. 

Ward is primarily a psychologist, and his article on Psy- 
chology in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was 
one of the chief influences in bringing about the displacement 
of the older association psychology by its more humanistic and 
voluntaristic successor. His earlier book. Naturalism and Ag- 
nosticism, is a particularly vigorous attack upon the tendencies 
indicated in the title. It aims to show in the first place that 
the mechanistic concepts of science are only methodological 
devices adopted for human convenience. There have been two 
main ways of defending spiritual interests against naturalistic 
deductions from the results of science. All that the scientist 
is inclined to claim for the universality of his laws may be 
granted freely, and then the sting removed by reinterpreting 
the whole situation in such a way that mechanism now 
enters as a subordinate element into a higher category, which, 
accordingly, does not compete with it at all. Or, on the other 
hand, we may attempt in various ways to weaken the force of 
the scientific claims themselves. This in a crude form was the 
method which supernaturalism had adopted; and in spite of 
the discredit into which of late it has fallen, logically its case 
was not a bad one. As against a superstitious veneration for 
the accepted scientific formulas of the day, at any rate, it was 
still possible to urge, with Stanley Jevons, the purely tenta- 
tive and hypothetical character of all laws of science, — which 

^A very recent defense of the same conception is C. A. Richardson's 
Spiritual Pluralism and Recent Philosophy . 



330 English and American Philosophy 

are only inductions from a very limited experience, — the ex- 
cellent chance that they may later have to be revised, and their 
failure in any case to account for the peculiar collocations of 
the agents whose procedure they formulate. 

Ward's criticism does not identify itself unambiguously with 
either of these methods; indeed it is not easy to determine at 
times to just what issue it is pointed. On the whole, it gives 
the impression of being negative and destructive, and of leav- 
ing the notion of scientific law in a state of bad repair; and 
yet Ward plainly intends no disrespect to science, but only 
to some of its philosophical interpreters. The trouble is 
probably due in the main to a failure to draw sharply enough 
the lines of division between scientific methodology and 
metaphysics. What Ward most explicitly denies is the right 
to interpret the real world ultimately in terms of mechanistic 
concepts; and his method of doing this is by arguing that 
the laws of quantitative and descriptive science are not 
actual transcriptions of reality, but hypothetical devices, se- 
lective and 'partial in their nature, for the securing of intel- 
lectual and practical control over a world unmanageable in 
its full complexity. What is real in its own right, we only 
come in contact with in concrete and sensuous experience; and 
since, as a psychologist. Ward had found experience to be 
fundamentally conative in its nature, teleology and purpose 
cannot be driven from the universe by mechanism, itself only 
one of the tools which purposes employ. So far there is nothing 
to make it necessary to suppose that this ultimate metaphysical 
interpretation is intended to compete with science, or to enter 
into scientific explanations. But apparently Ward does intend 
to draw this last conclusion also ; and accordingly his disparage- 
ment of mechanistic concepts does not stop with their philo- 
sophical pretensions, but extends to their scientific use as well. 
Not only is there no logical necessity attaching to the notion 
of mechanical law, but in point of fact such law breaks down 
at many points even in its application to inorganic nature, is 



James Ward 331 

helpless before the problems of qualitative difference and of 
origin, and has explicitly to be supplemented by the teleological 
category when we turn to biology and psychology. 

The dispute here is one for scientists to settle; meanwhile 
it may be pointed out that Ward's position is unnecessarily 
complicated by the failure to make sufficiently clear an obvious 
distinction. There are scientific concepts — the concept of an 
atom for example — of which it is possible to claim that they 
are mere conveniences to the imagination in our efforts at 
description, without running any risk of interfering in the real 
business of science; whether they are fictions or realities is a 
fair question for the philosopher to investigate, but in either 
case their practical value is much the same. But it is danger- 
ous to use similar language of the actual quantitative laws of 
science. These are "selective," but they do not seem to be 
"fictitious"; for unless they formulate, however imperfectly, 
relationships actually present in reality, how could they have 
any show of working? It is not probable that Ward really in- 
tends to deny this. But through failure to emphasize the 
necessary discrimination, he sometimes appears to do so; and 
indeed, when we turn to the metaphysical aspects of his pan- 
psychism, it even becomes doubtful whether this is not the 
logical issue of his doctrine, and whether a world of pysches 
is competent to sustain that intricate network of exact quanti- 
tative relations which scientific law presupposes. 

6. Ward's proof of panpsychism follows in general the cus- 
tomary lines. By a variety of considerations — the demands 
of the principle of continuity in natural evolution, the inherent 
plausibility of an hypothesis which looks to the sort of reality 
we know immediately as a clue to the nature of reality at large, 
the difficulty of solving the problem of the relation of mind and 
body on a dualistic view — we are led to the acceptance of con- 
sciousness as the omnipresent stuff of which natural objects are 
the appearance. Just what physical facts reveal the presence 
of an individual unity of spirit, it is not possible or necessary 



332 English and American Philosophy 

always to determine, though in man, the self seems in its ex- 
ternal appearance to be identified with the nervous system. 
More specifically, we are to conceive of the central self or 
monad as the head of a group of lesser monads in the organism, 
to which it has a peculiar and direct relationship of spiritual 
"rapport." Meanwhile these inferior monads also stand re- 
lated to still others outside the body; and this explains how 
reports of an external world can come to the self, and how its 
commands can get executed in this world, without its having 
any consciousness of the intervening processes. The relation 
is similar to that which the citizen has to the various officials 
of the state, of whose methods in his service he may be in 
entire ignorance.^ 

7. The special purpose of Ward's later volume. The Realm 
of Ends, is to erect a spiritualistic theism on the basis of this 
panpsychist interpretation. Accepting the methodological 
principle that any possible philosophy must start from the 
empirical fact of the finite self, and that a monism which at- 
tempts to reverse the process can never logically get back to 
the finite world at all, an essay is first made to see how far a 
metaphysical pluralism can go in the way of accounting for 
the objective order of the world, conceived as the evolutionary 
construct of finite beings striving for selt-realization, and gradu- 
ally creating what we know phenomenally as scientific law — 
which is nothing but the routine of acquired habit — as a means 
of social communication and cooperation. The conclusion is, 
however, that a thoroughgoing pluralism leaves something still 
to be desired both at its lower and its upper limit. In terms 
of origins, it carries us back to monads of a degree of in- 
determinateness so great as to make the process of evolution, 
— the evolution of a unity in no sense there at the start, — 
very hard to conceive; and also it offers no guarantee that the 
moral and spiritual ideals in which the final meaning of the 
process lies can ever be satisfactorily attained. A doctrine of 
^The Realm of Ends, pp. 256 ff., 461 ff. 



James Ward 333 

theism which supplements finite monads by a world-ground to 
whose creative activity their nature, as themselves free and 
creative agents, is due, which offers an already existing basis 
to sustain their intercourse, and which can assure the final 
triumph of the good, is, therefore, in the absence of difficulties 
fatal to the conception, a plausible and legitimate extension 
of pluralistic premises, though it can never be rationally demon- 
strated, 

8. It has seemed most reasonable on the whole to interpret 
Ward's system as consistently theistic and pluralistic; though 
there are aspects of it which it is not easy to distinguish at 
times from such an absolutism as that of Pringle-Pattison. In 
one respect, however, he is even less "realistic" than certain of 
the monists. Ward conceives that a theory of knowledge which 
is to justify his results must start from a repudiation of "dual- 
ism"; it is a question whether, on the contrary, he is not in 
this way making them logically insecure. Now dualism has 
several quite distinct meanings, which it is easy, but dangerous, 
to lump together. It may mean a dualism of kind between 
mind and matter; and this is the only thing that idealism as 
such is interested to deny. Or it may mean a dualism of 
existence between the thinking mind and the object which it 
knows, — epistemological dualism. Or, finally, it may mean a 
dualism of existence between consciousness and the brain, — 
which last is of course not the "object" of knowledge; and this 
is the particular issue for panpsychism in the form in which 
Ward among others accepts it. Now in urging monism in the 
first and third senses, Ward appears to suppose that he must 
hold it in the second sense as well. But not only is there no 
necessity for this; it is difficult to see how it can be done con- 
sistently with a panpsychist metaphysics. For panpsychism 
holds that there is an actual reality underlying what appesirs 
to us phenomenally as the world of nature — the reality of 
psychic beings, namely; and, supposedly, that there are at 
least some relationships existing among these monads which are 



334 English and American Philosophy 

duplicated in our scientific concepts. And unless, with ob- 
jective idealism, we identify finite knowing with the Absolute, 
all this involves a necessary duality between knowledge and its 
object. 

In denying this sort of dualism, Ward involves himself in the 
traditional difficulties present in an attempt to evolve knowl- 
edge out of what is not knowledge. "Objectivity," following 
the prevalent fashion among idealists, Ward undertakes to ac- 
count for, not as a reference to independent being, but as an 
ideal convention due to intersubjective intercourse. To recog- 
nize these related selves, however, implies also objectivity in 
a different sense; and if our knowledge is originally tied up to 
merely perceptual presentations, which involve no independent 
world, how do we come to possess this acquaintance with social 
"ejects"? To this very crucial step Ward devotes a couple of 
sentences,^ and we find ourselves thereupon engaged with con- 
siderations of what follows on the assumption that the step 
already has been safely taken. And even thus we have not yet 
got all that panpsychism requires. If the universe on which 
for science human life depends is but a schematic formulation 
of the points in common between the various experiences which 
the social life presupposes, it fails altogether to carry us to that 
vast world of lower selves with which we are not conscious of 
having any direct social relation. The theoretical need which 
sub-human monads are supposed to fill, implies that we already 
are convinced of the actual presence of an independent reality 
corresponding to the physical world, whose nature we then try 
more adequately to interpret; and if this assumption is a mis- 
take, and only a misreading of our recognition of identities in 
the experience of beings already in our social circle, no ground 
for the extension of the panpsychist hypothesis is apparent. 

9. That Ward fails to feel such difficulties as serious is due 
mainly to a conception of "experience" which he shares with 
many modern philosophers of various schools, but which by 
^Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. II, p. 165. 



James Ward 335 

others will be regarded as a liability rather than an asset. Ex- 
perience, namely, is not to be thought of as a subjective fact. 
What we have from the very start is a duality of subject and 
object in a unity of experience; and in consequence, the need of 
escaping from subjectivity never occurs. On the interpreta- 
tion however which Ward goes on to give to this, the solution 
turns out to be a verbal one. For this unity of experience 
is recognized after all as identified with the psychological life 
of an individual, and the object as only a psychological presen- 
tation; and that experience starts as perception, rather than as 
bare feeling, may be granted without appreciably affecting the 
real problem, which is that of understanding how we get to 
something that is not in any sense the content of an individual 
life. An object which is a perceptual presentation is still a per- 
ception of mine, and so after all subjective in the only sense 
that here comes in question. 

10. The merits of panpsychism itself, as a type of philo- 
sophical theory, are not easy to appraise in brief. It has called 
forth a large controversial literature; perhaps special mention 
should be made of William McDougall's Mind and Matter, 
which is noteworthy for the thoroughness and detail alike of 
its criticisms, and of its defence of the unpopular alternative 
theory of interactionism and "animism." Undoubtedly the 
first reaction of the unsophisticated mind to an interpretation 
of the physical world in terms of souls or mind-stuff, for the 
most part imimaginably obscure, is that of incredulity; and 
this natural feeling has its weight, though it ought not to hold 
out against strong reason. A more serious matter is the ques- 
tion to what extent such a reinterpretation of the natural world 
can adjust itself to the needs of scientific knowledge. The 
most thorough and candid attempt to meet the various objec- 
tions that can be brought here, is to be found in the writings 
of C. A. Strong; though this attempt leads to a remodeling of 
the conception which would not be accepted by the majority of 
panpsychists. 



336 English and American Philosophy 

Strong's metaphysical conclusions are dependent on the ap- 
parently paradoxical thesis that the "psychic" is as such not 
conscious. The term consciousness, that is, is identified with 
"knowledge"; and knowledge is not an entity, a thing or 
quality, but a function, which need not be bound up with 
psychic existence. It is this which, to begin with, renders 
accountable what otherwise would involve a miracle — the 
origin of consciousness or knowledge in the evolutionary proc- 
ess; consciousness is not a fact of existence which comes into 
being, but a way in which, through the medium of sensation 
or psychic reality, adjustment is made to the environment. Ac- 
cording to this "vehicular" theory of knowledge, knowing has 
two aspects; there is an "essence" of which the psychic sen- 
sation or image is the vehicle, and there is an act of affirma- 
tion by which this essence, or logical character, is referred to 
a reality in relation to the organism. It follows that the object 
which we know is not a phenomenal representation in con- 
sciousness for which an external cause is secondarily inferred; 
in the act of affirmation we are carried over directly to a non- 
subjective real, in which the essence is conceived to be em- 
bodied. And since this act of knowledge is, again, not itself a 
new qualitative kind of fact, but a bodily function in terms 
of the way in which sensation is used to guide the course of 
action, we can see how it is possible for it to arise in the proc- 
ess of evolution without our having anything new in kind 
on our hands to account for. 

II. Another difficulty for panpsychism, urged by Mc- 
Dougall, is to the effect that a universe of mind-stuff makes 
no provision for the unity of consciousness. Strong meets this 
objection by denjang the supposed fact ; the only unity of con- 
sciousness is that of a collection of data picked out by an act 
of cognitive attention, which act itself is not a single thing, 
but is analyzable, as a bodily reaction, into a complex series 
of processes. What however of the elementary psychic fact 
itself? Is not at least a sensation-quality a unity? Here 



C. A. Strong 337 

the vehicular theory of knowledge comes in again. The intro- 
spective knowledge of a psychic state, equally with knowledge 
of outer objects, dispenses with the actual presence of the 
reality which is known; it is a subsequent act which refers an 
essence to an experience already in the past. Since conscious- 
ness or feeling, therefore, does not belong to the psychical fact 
as such, but is, as always, a superadded function, we cannot 
appeal to it as if it could tell us infallibly what the psychic 
reality is; theoretically there is no reason why here, as else- 
where, our knowledge may not be in error, and why what 
seems a simple quality may not actually be exceedingly com- 
plex. This argument, it is true, assumes that consciousness as 
the way a feeling jeels, and consciousness as the way it is re- 
flectively known, are one and the same; and this seems a very 
doubtful assumption. But if the identification is granted, then 
it does logically weaken the claim that the psychical is only 
what we feel it to be, and so opens the way for giving con- 
sideration to certain reasons that can be adduced in favor of 
the belief that what we call a unitary conscious quality may 
actually be far from simple. Strong is especially inclined to 
welcome this conclusion, because it enables him to meet one 
point in particular which otherwise would be a serious ob- 
jection to his theory — the discrepancy between the apparent 
simplicity of the sense fact, and the extreme complexity which 
science reveals to us in the brain process which, by hjrpothesis, 
is supposed to be identical with it. If, however, qualities of 
sense are not simple, but are in reality a compound of indefi- 
nitely minute feelings, which appear one to introspection only 
because of our limited powers of discrimination, the objection 
disappears.^ 

12. One doubt is very likely to suggest itself when we con- 
template this outcome; in the supposed interests of reducing 
reality to the psychical, have we not turned the psychical itself 
into what only a considerable degree of subtlety enables us to 

^ The Origin of Consciousness, Chaps. 13, i"?, 16. 



338 English and American Philosophy 

distinguish from the physical? The ultimate element which 
underlies the psychical life is an entity about which, it ap- 
pears, all that we can say with confidence is, that it exists in 
time and space, that it changes its spatial position, and that it 
has degrees of attentive vividness or intensity. This last 
character is, as Strong allows, the only one in the list which 
prevents our calling the result materialism, and it is also the 
most obscure and dubious; vividness apart from qualitative 
content is not quite easy to conceive. Whatever name we 
choose however to give to our ultimate elements, the essential 
fact remains that in excluding from the psychic all specific 
characters which are not common to every psychical state 
alike. Strong's panpsychism, like materialism, ends by turning 
qualitative differences out of the imiverse altogether; if all 
reality is a combination of non-qualitative bits of stuff, and 
consciousness and the "essence" only a bodily reaction, sense 
quality as such has no locus anywhere, and we have simply 
to deny it — always a hazardous thing to do. 

13. Meanwhile one further point may be suggested which, 
if it is valid at all, applies to all forms of panpsychism alike. 
A sensation, we have been told, is the reality which to an out- 
side observer will appear phenomenally as a material brain proc- 
ess; is it possible to imagine this situation concretely in a way 
to satisfy that demand of science from which the theory really 
takes its start — the demand for a closed system of reality 
capable of description in terms of mechanical law? I have a 
sensation of red, we will say, and another man on getting into 
the proper relationship to this will see it as a physical change 
of some sort in my brain. And all the other real facts in the 
universe he conceivably might perceive under the same physical 
appearance as continuous with this, with one exception — his 
own conscious state of perceiving, namely. This last, while 
he is experiencing it, cannot in the nature of the case enter 
for him into the continuum of molecular changes which forms 
the system of science, and so it constitutes an outstanding fact 



C. A. Strong 339 

that refuses to accept phenomenal or scientific fonnulse. Even 
if it were conceivable that by some ingenious device I could 
be enabled to watch my own brain process while I was sensing 
red, I still should not be looking at the new perception which 
this would involve ; no matter how long I kept it up, that which 
I see, and my seeing it, could never merge one in the other, 
because they never would be the same in character. And if 
it is urged that while no one can see his own mental process 
while it is happening, he can think it, and so take it up ideally 
into a unified scientific whole, the answer is the same; to 
think the reality representatively there must first be a new 
thought to do the thinking. It is this thought now that stands 
outside the system as concretely imaginable; if we try to bring 
it in, there must be still another thought; and so always the 
chain of phenomenal reality is bound to leave one fact outside, 
and the perfect unity of science fails to be achieved. 



§ 3. Realism. Shadworth Hodgson. Hobhotise. Santayana 

I. The preceding sections have had in view primarily cer- 
tain developments of philosophical idealism; there remain to 
be considered here a number of tendencies that may roughly 
be characterized as realistic, though the term is so ambiguous 
that by itself it conveys no very distinct idea. It can be 
applied more strictly to theories which accept the reality of 
the physical universe in something like its common-sense or 
its scientific form. In a different sense however, — as an episte- 
mological term, — realism means only that in knowledge we 
become acquainted with reality other than the knowing proc- 
ess, leaving it to be determined in further ways what the 
nature of this reality may be. 

This epistemological realism, usually with the implication of 
a dualism, has been involved in a majority of the idealistic 
tendencies just reviewed, though for the most part it has been 



340 English and American Philosophy 

subordinate here to a metaphysical interest. Quite recently, 
however, it has shown a disposition to detach itself from meta- 
physics, and to give rise to a brisk discussion in its own 
character as a theory of knowledge. The most influential de- 
fender of an epistemological realism which refuses to abandon 
the belief in "mental states," is the psychologist G. F. Stout. 
Stout's theory of perception has been modified from time to 
time; in its latest form it holds that immediately apprehended 
sensibles carry with them always an ultimate and undefinable 
sort of reference to reality beyond themselves as their source. 
This reference, however, is to the whole source indiscriminately, 
the correlation of given qualities with a definite portion of 
reality, so that this becomes a particular thing distinguished 
from other things, being a secondary act due to discoverable 
psychological conditions; and in this way accordingly we are 
enabled to explain the presence of errors and illusions, with- 
out casting any doubt upon the validity of the ultimate refer- 
ence itself. Apparently, however, these sensibles are not to 
be taken as if they revealed a nature belonging to the source 
in the absence of perception; though they constitute its true 
appearance in the sense that they represent the way in which 
it expresses itself under assignable conditions.^ A later vari- 
ation of a realistic epistemology has already been mentioned 
in connection with the panpsychism of C. A. Strong. The dis- 
tinctive point in Strong's "vehicular" theory is its unqualified 
repudiation of the assumption that we first know sensations 
or internal presentations and then make an inference from 
them to the external cause, and its substitution of abstract 
characters or essences for concrete presentations, as that which 
alone is immediately apprehended. Recently there has ap- 
peared a cooperative volume called Essays in Critical Realism, 
by a number of American writers of whom Strong is one, in 
which, though with modifications in detail in the various es- 
says, there is agreement on the point that the known object 
^Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. XIV, pp. 381 ff., 404 f. 



Physical Realism 341 

is not identically given in experience, and that nevertheless the 
reference to it is original, and not a causal inference. 

2. Meanwhile, though more infrequently, — apart, that is, 
from the special developments of neo-realism to be considered 
in another chapter, — a realistic theory of knowledge is com- 
bined in some recent writers with a physical realism more or 
less explicit. An ontological dualism, resting on a dualistic 
epistemology which follows the traditional lines of the "repre- 
sentative" theory, has never ceased to maintain itself against 
all types of monism in Catholic philosophy, whose revival in the 
neo-scholasticism of recent times is a significant philosophical 
tendency; ^ and a not dissimilar combination is sometimes 
found where the influence of Scottish common sense still per- 
sists, though the account of knowledge here is apt to be modi- 
fied in the direction of Kant. Thus Henry Sidgwick may be 
mentioned in particular as inclining to a natural dualism which 
conceives of objectively valid knowledge in terms of relation- 
ships attributed to, an independent reality by the knowing mind. 
In other cases realism is accompanied by a still more sophisti- 
cated epistemology, which at times might probably be classi- 
fied as neo-realistic. Here belongs, for example, the Physical 
Realism of Thomas Case. On the assumption that a theory 
of knowledge is called upon to find a way of accounting for 
the accredited testimony of science, rather than to deduce the 
possibilities of knowledge from human nature, the fact that 
science puts its trust in a world inaccessible to the senses is 
by itself enough to set aside an idealism such as would reduce 
knowledge to sensations. On the other hand, Case takes for 
granted that biology has undermined the naive realism which 
supposes that we Imow directly outer things, by showing that, 
instead, the first objects of knowledge are the sensible effects 
which things have upon the inner organism. When we say that 

^ Among Catholic philosophers may be mentioned Peter Coffey, 
Thomas N. Harper, Howard Joyce, Michael Maher, John Rickaby, and 
Lester J. Walker. 



342 English and American Philosophy 

we perceive a tree, this perception is in reality an inference 
from sensible data, though an inference so long performed auto- 
matically that we cannot now disengage it. But now if ex- 
ternal objects can be scientifically inferred from sensible data, 
it must be that these data are themselves not psychical, but 
physical, since in logic an inference can pass only to what is 
similar in kind. The true sensible object is thus the nervous 
system itself; when I am apprehending "white," I am really 
perceiving the optic nerves sensibly affected in the manner 
apprehended as white. And if an external and physical world 
can properly be inferred as something necessary to explain the 
internal — but still physical — effect on the nervous system, so 
I have an equal right to infer to the insensible realm of scien- 
tific theory, — a realm stripped now of secondary qualities, 
though not of primary ones, — if this in turn is needed to ex- 
plain the crude physical objects of empirical sense perception. 
Meanwhile the sensible object needs to be distinguished not 
only from its external cause, but also, on the other hand, from 
the internal operation of apprehending it; and it is this last 
alone which constitutes the psychical. Two factors, accord- 
ingly, combine in all conscious operations; man is to be re- 
garded as a physical body which is not merely an extended 
substance, but which has the faculty of thought or awareness 
as well. In thus reducing consciousness to an act of awareness 
of physical content. Case anticipates the most characteristic 
doctrine of later English neo-realism; the contention however 
that this awareness, as a peculiar relation of subject to object, 
is directly of events within the nervous system, events actually 
characterized by secondary qualities which have as such no 
existence outside the organism, has apparently found no fol- 
lowers. 

Another more recent attempt to justify realistically the 
concepts of physical science .is C. D. Broad's Perception, 
Physics, and Reality, an acute and very painstaking examina- 



Physical Realism 343 

tion of the perceptual situation, ©f which the outcome is, that 
in spite of the fact that the immediate objects of perception are 
probably all appearances, nothing in the facts of illusion, or in 
the multiplicity of perspectives in which objects reveal them- 
selves to different observers, prevents our believing in a non- 
phenomenal cause of our perceptions, possessing a knowable 
nature in terms of the particular characters needed by physical 
science. In America, also, R. W. Sellars has defended a realis- 
tic account of knowledge which attempts to avoid alike the 
immediate or apprehensional theory of natural realism, and 
a dualistic or representational theory, by the process of re- 
ducing cognitive "ideas" to an apprehension of "propositions" 
— apparently, that is, of "relations" not identifiable with sen- 
sations or imagery — about an independent real. Here con- 
sciousness is made explicitly a function of the physical; it is 
the reality of the cortex illuminating and guiding itself. An- 
other American representative of realism is G. S. Fullerton, 
who in his later writings defends the world of everyday ex- 
perience, including even secondary qualities, as independently 
real, though he leaves the mechanism of knowledge somewhat 
obscure. 

3. There remain several recent philosophies of a more com- 
prehensive and systematic sort, which in view of their realistic 
emphasis belong most naturally in this connection. Of these 
the earliest, and the most difficult to classify satisfactorily, is 
that of Shadworth Hodgson. Hodgson sets out from a con- 
ception of metaphysical method which is a peculiar compound 
of logic and psychology not easy to disentangle. He professes 
to start from an analysis of experience wholly without pre- 
suppositions. Now the most ultimate distinction that we thus 
discover — and we find it in the simplest possible element of 
experience that we can isolate and attend to by itself — is, not 
that of Subject and Object, — of an agent, that is, separable 
from the thing it knows, and exercising causal efficiency, — but 



344 English and American Philosophy 

of Consciousness and Object, as two inseparable aspects of 
one and the same ultimate entity, from which all distinctions 
of existence must be derived in some later moment of reflection. 
If we attempt to interpret these statements, what stands out 
most plainly is this, that Hodgson's method takes its start, not, 
as previous empiricism had done, from experience as sensational 
fact, but from an analysis of its logical characters. It attempts 
to presuppose only the "whatness" of experienced content, as 
distinct from its "thatness'* or existence. This is not the di- 
rection in which we should be first inclined to turn; it seems 
rather more natural to suppose that the "natures" present in 
the world are capable of being held before the mind in their 
logical simplicity, only because "things" have first been recog- 
nized which possess these natures; "logical" facts seem to pre- 
suppose already a considerable work of analysis. And also 
the inevitable question at once arises, whether this does not 
leave on our hands an insoluble problem; is it any more pos- 
sible to make the transition from logic to existence, if we once 
start with the former, than it is to begin with psychology, and 
pass to an existence independent of consciousness? There is 
indeed one possible interpretation of the method for which 
the difficulty would not exist. It might be that we are simply 
taking over our existing beliefs, and analyzing them to see what 
they really are, or imply ; in that case existence will undoubtedly 
emerge, since we do of course believe in existence. On this 
showing, the inseparability of consciousness and object would 
mean — and there are frequent utterances of Hodgson, indeed, 
which suggest this strongly — only that all content which we 
can talk about at all is known content, reality that is not a pos- 
sible object of knowledge being meaningless to us, — this ab- 
stract and ultimate fact of awareness being distinguishable, of 
course, only as a matter of logical analysis from the whatness 
of knowledge. And the metaphysical priority of a logical 
analysis to any science that deals with existence would then 
mean, that the validity of objective content, or whatness, is 



Shadworth Hodgson 345 

independent of the fact that the knowing process arises at a 
particular point in time, and has a momentary existence. But 
all this evidently is as far as possible from a philosophy "with- 
out presuppositions"; and it is mostly irrelevant to Hodgson's 
actual procedure. 

4. The way in which Hodgson himself attempts to effect 
the passage from logic to existence is exceedingly ingenious. 
It starts from the thesis that the least possible empirical 
moment of experience is, not a qualitative content simply, but 
a process as well; we find it a complex of which quality and 
duration are inseparable aspects. And this duration aspect in- 
volves memory; the persistence of qualitative content means 
that the simplest momentary experience always contains im- 
plicitly the distinction of past and present. Now in a single 
moment, — in the experience, say, of hearing a note, A, — there 
fs no recognition of duplicity. But if A be followed by a 
second note B, A then becomes, by virtue of the fact of dura- 
tion or memory, a "that" as well as a "what"; the later por- 
tion of the process continued into B has its own prior portion, 
together with the content of that portion, as its object, from 
which it is now distinguished as a subjective perceiving. The 
process-content of one moment is thus always the object or 
objective aspect of the next or retrospective moment; and this 
is the perception of existence in its lowest terms .^ 

It seems very doubtful whether this first and crucial step 
in Hodgson's analysis can be regarded as successful. Even 
if — and this is by no means clear — the logical character of 
duration can be supposed to generate the psychological act of 
memory or perceiving — can be taken as the equivalent of "con- 
sciousness," — it still is not evident how "existence" enters in. 
That we can be aware of that which is merely a "whatness," 
the whole analysis presupposes; and there appears no reason 
why a past "what" should turn thereupon into a "that," as a 
fact of a new order. It is difficult not to think that Hodgson 
^ Metaphysic of Experience, Vol. I, pp. !?9 ff. 



346 English and American Philosophy 

imagines himself to have gotten hold of "existence" here, only 
because he really has had in his mind all along something more 
than logical content — the sensation, namely, to which the 
"quality" belongs. This of course is an existent; but it is 
presupposed to be such, and existence has not been deduced 
from a presuppositionless content. 

And in any case, even if the transition be regarded as ac- 
complished, Hodgson, after all his trouble, still is left with 
the traditional difficulties of empiricism on his hands; and 
his method from now on becomes the familiar attempt to de- 
rive a cosmos from "states of consciousness." His account of 
the passage from objects as mental presentations to objects 
as physical existents ranks high among similar attempts for 
ingenuity.^ Indeed it is so ingenious as to inspire great respect 
for the primitive intelligence which could conduct a line of 
reasoning so subtle and complicated that it puts a strain even 
on the philosophic mind to follow it. But in the end it gets 
its way, as usual, only by smuggling in the point to be es- 
tablished. Meanwhile it should not be overlooked, however, 
that Hodgson's treatment has at least a distinct advantage over 
Kantian idealism, in its explicit recognition that knowledge as 
such is not a cause or ground of existence, and that any pos- 
sible analysis in terms of timeless cognitive content must be 
supplemented, if we are ever to come into contact with the 
real world of agents which common sense and science alike 
presuppose. 

5. Apart from the ambiguities of his method, the general 
outcome of Hodgson's philosophy is comparatively straight- 
forward. The only real condition or agency with which we are 
acquainted is matter. Consciousness itself is a condition neither 
of matter, nor of other conscious content; and when we turn 
therefore to psychology as a science, it is to the body alone 
that we can appeal for purposes of causal explanation. But it 
is only the occurrence, the coming into existence, of conscious- 
^Ibid., Vol. I, Chaps. 7, 8. 



Shadworth Hodgson 347 

ness which is thus explained; matter is a condition, but not 
a cause, if we mean by cause something capable of accounting 
for the entire fact of consciousness, including its "'whatness" 
also. Consciousness is indeed itself the source from which 
our concrete notion of matter is derived, so that it cannot be 
explained by a matter whose own nature is given in terms which 
it supplies. While, then, in dealing with the world of existences 
and of explanatory science, — whose aim it is to discover the 
conditions of becoming, and not of essences, — Hodgson is 
thoroughgoing in the denial of any efficacy whatever to con- 
sciousness, the nature or whatness of consciousness is an ulti- 
mate fact, which brings us after all in closer contact with meta- 
physical reality than matter does. 

Furthermore, although matter is the only real condition 
knowable by us, we are forced by the demands of complete ex- 
planation to seek for matter itself a more ultimate condition, 
since it is not self-explanatory; and so we are pointed to an 
unseen world behind the visible one. The nature of this world 
is cut off from the speculative reason, though in strictness it 
is not unknowable; for if the very notion of reality is bound 
up with knowability, then even to think existence means 
that it has in so far its subjective aspect, since it forms an 
object of thought. What we mean by its unknowableness is 
only that its direct and presentative features are not open to 
our special type of consciousness; although, since we have good 
dialectical reason to accept its existence, we must suppose that 
there is consciousness of a different sort that does know them. 
But while thus we can have no speculative knowledge of the 
nature of this invisible universe that conditions the material 
one, we are also led to recognize that the practical reason, 
under the stress of emotional feeling, cannot avoid clothing 
it in the only imagery at its disposal; and by this path we 
are forced to think of it as a conscious and personal Power 
such as knows the hidden motives of the heart, and in whom 
the perfect harmony of desires that constitutes the criterion 



348 English and American Philosophy 

of morally right action is, or will be, completely realized. And 
so long as we remember that this has no speculative validity, 
— though it has its necessary cause in the neural processes 
which condition all belief, — such a Faith, as the basis of 
the religious consciousness, has all the justification it requires.^ 
6. In somewhat more obvious relation to earlier English 
naturalism, and especially to J. S. Mill, is the philosophical 
work of L. T. Hobhouse, who carries on Mill's empiricism, 
and his political liberalism as well, with something of the same 
spirit and the same comprehensiveness. In Hobhouse, how- 
ever, the familiar metaphysics of empiricism is very materially 
modified. To begin with, the doctrine of an apprehension of 
immediate sense content or fact, apart entirely from thought 
processes, is interpreted as from the start an awareness or 
assertion of extra-conscious reality. As a matter of fact there 
is some difficulty in gathering from Hobhouse's treatment 
whether there is such a thing as sensation at all in the older 
empirical sense, and if there is, just how it stands related to 
the objective content of knowledge on the one hand, and the 
"act" of apprehension on the other. This content of immediate 
apprehension we come consciously to recognize as an inde- 
pendent existence by reflection upon certain peculiarities in 
our experience. The phenomena of experience are found divid- 
ing into two groups which have different modes of behavior, con- 
tents that range themselves along with my aches and pains 
as dependent on my body, no matter in what part of space I 
am, getting classed together as the self, while those which are 
given in permanent space relations, or which change their 
relations in accordance with uniform laws of motion, form 
another group. And the objects in this last group not only 
are separate from other psychical facts of feeling, but as a 
consequence of our discovering universal laws in the occur- 
rence of phenomena, they are shown to be independent even 
of the act of consciousness that makes them objects of per- 
^Ibid., Vol. IV, pp. 209 ff, 225, 334 ff. 



L. T. Hothouse 349 

ception. For since a fact often occurs in experience without 
anyone observing at the time the prior fact which a conformity 
of past experience has shown to be its cause, this operates as 
a negative instance to eliminate the character of "being per- 
ceived" as a necessary part of the cause; and as the cause 
actually has produced its effect, it must therefore exist un- 
perceived. 

It is to be added further that, although apprehension is 
prior to the thinking process, among the contents of immediate 
apprehension are to be found not only sensational qualities 
but relations, which are, therefore, a part of the given, and 
not, as the Kantians suppose, a contribution by the "mind." 
Meanwhile the business of thought, as distinct from appre- 
hension, is to build up the given data into a concrete system, 
by the methods of analysis, memory — which is an awareness 
of a content as past, as apprehension is the awareness 
of content as present, — construction into wholes, and generali- 
zation. The validity of such a system is tested by the con- 
vergence of many judgments each adding additional weight 
to the rest, the corroboration which the various methods lend 
to one another constituting also the rational justification of 
the methods themselves. The only a priori elements in ex- 
perience are thus the operations of the mind that deal with 
the given. These functions are themselves not given, since 
they would exist, and perform their work, though they were 
never explicitly observed; but also they supply no content, 
which last comes from sense apprehension only. 

7. In his earlier book. The Theory of Knowledge, Hobhouse 
inclines to an empirical caution in making claims about the 
nature of the real system to which thought points. Negatively, 
neither the mechanical nor the teleological category can be 
equal to it ; probably the concept of an organism is most nearly 
adequate. Meanwhile, though teleology cannot be applied to 
the world as a whole, it is a real fact in the world. As the self, 
or psycho-physical whole, — the intimate, though confessedly 



350 English and American Philosophy 

mysterious, union of consciousness and its bodily conditions, — 
develops the power of intelligent prevision, the process of evo- 
lution comes more and more to be modified by its action; 
though the natural conditions which thus prove amenable to 
intelligence cannot themselves be reduced to the creation of 
conscious purpose. It is here apparently that Hobhouse's 
chief interest in ultimate questions about the nature of reality 
is located — in the desire to find a ground for that confidence 
in the possibility and permanence of human progress which is 
the informing spirit of Liberalism. 

In a later volume, Development and Purpose, Hobhouse goes 
further in a speculative attempt to show our right to extend 
to the universe as a whole that conception of purposive de- 
velopment, definable as a process moving under the control 
of the idea of its own causal tendency, which experience re- 
veals to us as the reality and meaning of human life. In the 
impulse toward organic harmony and self-realization, working 
under the limiting conditions of the body on which the mind's 
existence depends, and gradually subduing these, we are to find 
a clue to what on a larger scale is the most reasonable interpre- 
tation of the cosmic order also. This harmony does not by 
itself explain existence, else the world would be already per- 
fect; reality is not spiritual, but the spiritual is an aspect of 
reality, the moving force of ethical development. We can feel 
assured, however, that what exists must be capable of being 
harmonized, since otherwise we should be threatening the va- 
lidity of our whole understanding of experience, which we can 
only define, in a way to give us rational satisfaction, in terms 
of development along definite lines of tendency. Reality, then, 
at any given time, is a system of elements conditioning, and 
conditioned by, a principle of organization leading up to an 
ultimate harmony; and through this principle everything real 
is thus related to the harmony, in spite of the discord which 
we have to recognize as a feature of reality at the start. In 
thus reducing Mind, however, which alone renders development 



George S ant ay ana 351 

intelligible, to one aspect only of a completer whole, in which 
the conditions to be overcome still seem to our thought to be 
external, it is not apparent that, save in intention, Hobhouse 
has really succeeded in overcoming a troublesome dualism, — 
a dualism which is not to be avoided by calling the reality one, 
or even by calling it psycho-physical. It is significant that 
Hobhouse is compelled to admit that such a Mind can hardly 
be similar to what we know as mind; which is only a rounda- 
bout way of saying that the conception cannot really be con- 
strued by us. 

8. Standing apart from all the accredited philosophical 
schools of the day, and notable also as one of the almost neg- 
ligible number of philosophical writers who are literary artists 
as well as thinkers, is the representative of still another type 
of naturalism, — a naturalism which, as in the case of George 
Meredith, is itself explicitly an ideal value, rather than a mere 
handmaid to science. George Santayana's lack of influence in 
proportion to the weight of his contribution to philosophical 
sanity and clarity, perhaps due in part to the academic dis- 
trust of literary gifts, is also not unconnected with a tone of 
condescension which he is apt to adopt toward competing 
views, as calling rather for indulgence than for serious argu- 
ment. In consequence his work is more impressive as an 
imaginative picture of a certain outlook on the spiritual life 
of man, than for its explicit dialectical grounding. The lead- 
ing motive is suggested by the title of his chief work. The Life 
of Reason; it is an insistence on the need for a rationalization 
of experience, in terms solely of the natural life, while yet 
recognizing the central place in life of value, or the ideal. This 
Life of Reason takes two forms, whose logical relation is on 
the surface not entirely evident. For purposes of explanation, 
Reason can be satisfied only with science and mechanism. The 
source of all that happens is, unequivocally, the physical world, 
of which the bodily organism is that portion which consti- 
tutes ''myself," — a world concerning which it is of the first 



352 English and American Philosophy 

importance to recognize that it is neither logical nor moral, 
but just a brute given fact. And matter is the ojtly causal 
agent; consciousness is simply a natural product which is not 
a cause, but a report of what is going on in the organism, the 
voice of the body's interests, the witness and reward of its 
operations. 

But while consciousness thus is useless, it is not worthless; 
indeed, it is the only seat and source of worth. The physical 
as such has no significance. Merely because a thing happens 
to exist gives it no claim whatever on our approval. It is in 
the recognition, not of existence or causality, but of preferable- 
ness, of the satisfying quality o'f such ends as the body strives 
for that it may harmonize and fulfil its natural needs, that 
value lies; and so the second task of Reason is to constitute 
that ideal realm wherein nature takes on form and value as 
viewed from the vantage-ground of a human interest, and be- 
comes rational in proportion as the life of impulse is brought 
into a harmonious whole. Reason, then,' must on the one 
hand recognize the source of the ideal always in matter, and de- 
cline to confuse scientific inquiry into causes by considerations 
of end or meaning; moral interest involves special preferences 
of a particular organism, by which it is chimerical to expect 
the rest of the world to be determined. And yet this implies on 
the other hand that values, through the very fact that they 
are not causes in the natural world, have their own intrinsic 
validity as essences within the life of Reason itself, inex- 
pugnable so long as we are consistent in refusing to materialize 
the ideal, and bring it down into the realm of existences to 
play a part among other things. Such a materializing of the 
ideal is "superstition"; we first turn the facts of living into a 
myth or symbol, — as we have a right to do if it enhances 
their value, — but then go on to substantialize these myths, 
and forget their merely poetic function, using thus our false 
persuasion of the invisible presence of the ideal to justify and 
protract its absence. Briefly, then, to unite a trustworthy con- 



George Santayana 353 

ception of the conditions under which man lives with an ade- 
quate conception of his interests, to adjust all demands to one 
ideal and adjust that ideal to its natural conditions, — this is to 
live the life of Reason. 

9, The method which Santayana chooses for recommending 
his philosophy, as has been said before, is on the whole more 
effective in bringing home its aesthetic appeal than in straight- 
ening out speculative tangles. There is very slight attempt to 
prove — what it would clearly be impossible to prove in any 
strict sense — that value is the product of purely mechanical 
and unideal processes, that consciousness is an epiphenomenon 
without practical efficacy, that purpose is impossible as an ob- 
jective category; and the critical objections that have been 
many times brought against such doctrines are given scant 
consideration. Nor is this from Santayana's standpoint an 
unreasonable attitude; if reason consists in a perceived harmony 
of ideal values, we might expect the prestige of his naturalism 
to be found resting less upon scientific or dialectic argument 
than on its own inherent reasonableness — on the satisfying 
emotional or aesthetic appeal, that is, which it makes to the 
contemplative mind. Even practical considerations are not 
relevant here; the pragmatic argument that only by looking 
for effective causality in the mechanical and the physical are 
we enabled to control experience, and lead the natural life 
successfully, hardly comes in question, since knowledge be- 
longs to that life of ideal essence which is totally ineffective, 
and the body will act as is its nature to act in any case. If 
we are to understand the force of the appeal which physical 
naturalism makes, we must look for it where all value lies — 
in the life of ideal Reason itself; we must justify the scientific 
explanation of value as itself a value. And there is unquestion- 
ably an emotional appeal just in the sense that we have got 
down to the bedrock of reality denuded of all subjective and 
meretricious charms, that our mind is working impersonally 
on fact, and facing without flinching whatever existence has 



354 English and American Philosophy 

to offer, regardless of personal or even human demands. And 
so taken, we can see how the scientific background may itself 
form an integral part of the ideal life of which it is supposed 
to be the independent and unideal basis, and so can bring 
together after a fashion the two forms of the work of Reason. 

ID, One point however continues to be troublesome when 
we turn to the ideal itself. The conception of a naturalistic 
ethics, wherein the bodily functions are transmuted into felt 
values unspoiled by sentimentalism or by superstition, we are 
apparently not to understand in the sense in which to most 
men it would approve itself. In strictness it would seem that 
the good can hardly after all consist in living a harmonious 
life of the instmcts. The life of Reason consists not in 
natural living in its own right, but in its translation into terms 
of ideal and rational appreciation; it belongs to the realm of 
essence, and not of existence, while action is a member of this 
latter world. For our ordinary view there is no difficulty here, 
because the ability to recognize cognitively the nature of 
natural value is also a tool for getting it more adequately real- 
ized; reason is itself an aspect of satisfying conduct. But if 
consciousness has absolutely no practical efficacy, but is only 
a "sort of ritual solemnizing the chief episodes in the body's 
fortunes," we are forced to reinterpret our natural prejudice in 
favor of conduct; value will consist not in living the harmonious 
life, but in contemplating and understanding its ideal harmony. 

And this seems actually to be the outcome. The good for 
Santayana limits itself in the end to the exercise of Reason 
on its ideal material; it is a value that rests on "rational" 
activity merely with its twofold satisfaction — the satisfac- 
tion that comes from the unhampered exercise of mind, when 
to this is added the aesthetic charm which the mind's creations 
may possess. In a word, the one true value lies in the vision of 
the artist clarified by reason, and working on the stuff of life 
itself, — the ideal of a contemplative participation in eternal 
truth and beauty. Such an ideal has a real claim to rank 



George S ant ay ana 355 

among human goods. And it is by reason of this standpoint 
of contemplation rather than of action, — where varying ideals 
are apt fatally to collide, — that Santayana is able to offer so 
wide a hospitality to individual differences of ideal, without 
apparently feeling the need to subordinate them to any general 
standard of the good. But just on this account it may be 
urged that he has forfeited the right to set up his own indi- 
vidual ideal as the one authoritative form of good, which is 
what he really does when he ties it up with the whole intellec- 
tual understanding of the universe which as reasonable beings 
we are bound to accept, and even, one may suspect, finds in 
it implicitly at least his major premise. 

II. One further aspect of the situation calls for some at- 
tention on the part of metaphysics. Perhaps the most difficult 
point in Santayana's system is the status to be assigned to 
"essences." An essence, on the simplest interpretation, repre- 
sents the "nature" of things, as this enters into consciousness 
to constitute knowledge; it is the stuff out of which the life 
of Reason is formed, the dialectical setting forth of whose 
eternal relationships constitutes the realm of logic. But whence 
comes this immensely intricate world of ideal natures? San- 
tayana's naturalism would prepare us to suppose that its source 
lies in the physical world of science; and this in so far is an 
intelligible claim, though open to the difficulty, traditionally 
attaching to all materialisms, that many characters have a place 
in the ideal life of which physics knows absolutely nothing. 
But when we try to bring the more explicit philosophy of 
nature into connection with the doctrine of essence, no such 
simple theory will satisfy the requirements. 

In the first place, when we consider the claim that science 
itself is a form of the life of Reason, a doubt is bound to sug- 
gest itself whether some casuistic reservation is not present in 
the use of the prestige of natural science to support the sys- 
tem. In point of fact, while the outcome appears constantly 
to presuppose the realistic concept of a law-abiding physical 



356 English and American Philosophy 

process independent of human experience, and capable of being 
definitely and precisely characterized in scientific terms, San- 
tayana's philosophical interpretation suggests a quite different 
picture. For the stuff of reality, we are told, is just the flux 
of sense experience itself,^ "nature" being an ideal construct 
belonging only to the realm of essence; science, equally with 
religion, is a myth or symbol, though it is a fruitful symbol, 
in that we are enabled by it to predict actual occurrences in 
the universal flux. But a flux of sensations means a very 
different sort of world from the realistic world which science 
and common sense take for granted; it is not at all clear how 
the one has any community with the other. And indeed 
Santayana's account of the "objects" which a realistic view 
would seem to imply, as a local conglomeration of several 
simultaneous sensations cut out from the flux by a particular 
interest, points definitely to the older sensationalism, rather 
than to realism .2 

Meanwhile another element of uncertainty enters in, when 
we try to understand the relation of the "essence" to this 
natural world. It would be simplest to suppose that the es- 
sence — its qualitative basis that is — is actually present in the 
flux, and that the mythical character of "nature" means only 
that our human constructs are a selection from the immensely 
more complicated structure of the natural world. And this is 
indeed what the preceding account of "objects" appears to 
involve; essences are described as ultimate and unexplainable 
characters of the flux of experience itself, which come to con- 
sciousness as ideal entities through the revival in memory of 
similar sensations temporally distinct, and which must be thus 
recognized as a precondition for the construction of objects. 
It is such a conception that explains the doctrine of the in- 
effectiveness of consciousness; if an idea is simply the recog- 
nition of a character common to different portions of the 
stream of sensation, it can of course have no causal effect upon 
^Reason in Common Sense, pp. 124 f. 'Ibid., Ch. 7. 



George S ant ay ana 357 

the flow of this stream. But now along with this there is 
another, and a seemingly inconsistent interpretation. This is 
the conception of essences as inhabiting an ideal realm apart 
from all that exists. Nothing, we are told, can ever exist in 
nature or for consciousness which has not a prior and inde- 
pendent locus in a realm of essences. The foundation of being 
is distinguishable quality, and were there no sets of differing 
characters, one or more of which an existing thing might 
"appropriate," existence would be altogether impossible. 
There is an infinite storehouse of such natures on which we 
draw to clothe the universal flux, though only such as are 
suggested by matter and its functions can really enter into 
experience for us. The superiority of the "real world" — the 
selection of essences from this ideal realm which it has been 
found convenient to read into the brute facts of sense — over 
other possible worlds, lies only in the greater interest it pos- 
sesses for a being himself the product of nature.^ In the 
Life of Reason these latter claims, indeed, it would appear are 
only intended to apply to the dialectical relations that hold 
between empirical characters; ^ and in that case they stand 
for what is indeed a plausible account of the apparent fact. 
But if essence as such is to be located in a higher and inde- 
pendent realm, we are dealing with a much more ambitious 
and speculative contention, which opens up all the difficulties 
that traditionally attach to a Platonic realism. 

12. One further essay in the direction of realism, though 
it was left in so unfinished a form that it is impossible to say 
what its final complexion would have been, is that of Robert 
Adamson. Adamson made his reputation originally as one of 
the most distinguished and most learned of the idealistic school ; 
toward the close of his life, however, he conceived himself to 
have broken, in some considerable measure at least, with its 
accepted tenets. What most definitely he repudiates is the de- 

^ Journal of Philosophy, Vol. VIII, pp. 60 ff. 
^Cf. Reason in Science, pp. 146 f. 



358 English and American Philosophy 

pendence of reality upon self-consciousness. From this he 
turns to a more naturalistic conception; the self already pre- 
supposes experience as objective, in that the object cannot be 
regarded as its creation. The primitive foundation for ob- 
jectivity lies in the spatial character of experience. At times 
this seems to leave self-consciousness as the efflorescence of a 
physical reality which exists independent of awareness, the 
character of inner reference which constitutes the psychical 
being the quality of a certain configuration that emerges 
in the process of development.^ Other passages point rather 
to a more psychological conception of experience as the medium 
in which all distinctions whatsoever arise, self and not- 
self developing pari passu. At least, however, it would appear 
that for Adamson reality is a real process or growth, not 
indeed guided by a conscious end, but nevertheless genuinely 
creative, and passing into new forms; it is inconsistent therefore 
with the eternal completeness of absolutism. If the objective 
world can be called non-temporal, it is only in the sense that, 
as the common point of reference for the experiences of a 
number of similar percipient subjects, it is taken as logical 
content, and so as abstracted from existence.^ 

^Development of Modern Philosophy, Vol. I, pp. 355 f, 
^Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 275, 305. 



CHAPTER VII 
PRAGMATISM 

§ I. C. S. Peirce. Schiller 

I. A definition of pragmatism is hardly attainable that will 
do justice to all the various motives that influence its adher- 
ents. The most unequivocal and universal motive is, perhaps, 
the negative one of an opposition to "intellectualism," with its 
world of static perfection and logical completeness. This op- 
position is of course not limited to the pragmatists ; voluntarism, 
so-called, has been seen already to enter largely into latter-day 
philosophy, and there are points at which personal idealism and 
pragmatism come so closely together that it is not an easy mat- 
ter to distinguish them. But while both make use of the 
newer psychology with its teleological background, and its 
acceptance of the temporal process, they use it in the service 
of somewhat different interests. The concern for individuality 
and selfhood is, at least in the more thoroughgoing forms of 
pragmatism, supplanted almost wholly by an emphasis on the 
general laws and conditions of progress, in which the person 
tends to be a vanishing moment. Accordingly there is in prag- 
matism a much closer community in method with the larger 
and more impersonal scientific movements of the day; indeed 
these form on the whole its most important intellectual ante- 
cedent. Pragmatism stands for the importation into philosophy 
of the experimental attitude which science represents, — an ex- 
perimentalism with a strongly positivistic tone, for which ideas 
are fruitful hypotheses and ways of getting results, rather 

359 



360 English and American Philosophy 

than attempts at describing an independently real world. 
Especially close is the connection with Darwinism, with its sub- 
stitution of a fluid process of adjustment and readjustment for 
the fixed boundary lines of the older conceptions of nature. It 
is only as method, however, — a method to be applied primarily 
to social and political experience rather than to the physical 
world, — that science particularly interests the pragmatist; and 
it is in these social bearings that probably his most distinctive 
motive is to be looked for. On this side, pragmatism is an 
expression of the more radical forms of the modem democratic 
temper, with its distrust of political institutions established 
once for all, and not subject to the free play of intelligence. 

2. The first to use the term pragmatism in this connection 
was the American scientist and logician Charles S. Peirce; and 
Peirce was recognized by *James at least as one of the original 
sources of his own pragmatic doctrine. As a matter of fact 
the content to be traced back to this particular source is not 
very substantial, and Peirce himself later repudiated the glosses 
that James had put upon it. Peirce is explicit in denying that 
thought creates its object, and definitely subscribes to the belief 
in a reality whose characters are independent of what anybody 
may think them to be. The function of the will in matters of 
belief is to control thought, to exercise cautious doubt, to 
weigh reasons; and this is the exact reverse of James' "will 
to believe," which is the will not to exercise this sceptical will. 
So Peirce refuses to accept the appeal to "consequences," in 
its more obvious personal and social sense; "I must confess," 
he writes for example, "that I belong to that class of scala- 
wags who prefer, with God's help, to look the truth in the face, 
whether doing so be conducive to the interests of society or 
not." 

Peirce's own pragmatism, which is a doctrine of the "meaning 
of ideas" rather than of "truth," is not itself free from 
obscurities, in spite of the fact that it forms the burden of an 
article on How to Make our Ideas Clear. Its original statement 



C. S. Peirce 361 

is as follows: "Consider what effects, which conceivably might 
have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our concep- 
tion to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole 
of our conception of the object." From the context, and from 
at least some of the illustrations adduced, one would suppose 
this merely intended to recommend the experimental habit of 
mind characteristic of the scientist who is unwilling to take 
the meaning of his ideas from authority, or from an analysis 
of their conceptual definition, but who insists upon putting 
them to work to see what they will amount to in perceptual 
terms, and what further perceptual characteristics they will de- 
velop. The meaning of ideas is simply what they come to in 
the concrete; "our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible 
effects." And this means not the effect in some particular prac- 
tical situation, but in all discoverable situations; the meaning 
of a proposition is "a general description of all the experimental 
phenomena which the assertion of the proposition virtually pre- 
dicts." Truth, meanwhile, carries for Peirce an entirely dif- 
ferent sense. Truth is the mental state at which inquiry aims, 
the satisfied feeling that ensues as we pass from doubt to settled 
belief, — not any satisfaction at random, but the satisfaction 
which would ultimately be found if the inquiry were pushed 
far enough, and whose experimental equivalent, or meaning, is 
the consensus of opinion among qualified investigators.^ In the 
outcome, then, the meaning of life would seem to reduce itself, 
for Peirce, to habits of experimental inquiry that aim to satisfy 
the intellectual demands of the scientific temper. And if this 
is the case, the phrase about "practical bearings" on which 
James seized, becomes either supererogatory, or actually con- 
fusing; since if it refers to the action involved in scientific 
"experiment" it is already sufficiently covered, while any ul- 
terior form of conduct introduces a new set of considerations 
with which the rest of the definition has no obvious point of 
connection. For habits of action are expressly regarded as hav- 
^ Popidar Science Monthly, Vol. XII, pp. 286 ff. 



362 English and American Philosophy 

ing their source in beliefs already formed; while it is to the 
process of forming these beliefs that the rule for making ideas 
clear applies. 

Peirce seems also to have influenced James on the meta- 
physical side by his doctrine, based on logical rather than on 
ethical grounds however, of the real presence of chance and 
indetermination in the world, and by a radical evolutionary 
interpretation of "law" as itself evolved from an original chaos 
of unpersonalized feeling, with a spontaneous tendency to 
growth and to the formation of habit. Such habits, as they be- 
come inveterate, are what we know as physical laws, matter 
being thus definable as effete mind, mind canalized in definite 
channels. Apparently this is a fate destined to overtake all 
reality in the remote future. 

3. As an explicit philosophy, pragmatism has developed 
along three main lines, more or less independent in their origin, 
and by no means identical in outcome. In England, its most 
prominent exponent is F. C. S. Schiller; and Schiller's prag- 
matism is on the whole the least novel of the three. A great 
part of what he has to say in detail may readily be interpreted 
without making it necessary to assume any radically new phi- 
losophic standpoint; it is the continuation of a tendency that 
had for a number of years been gathering momentum, — a ten- 
dency which has appeared in some of the forms of idealism 
dealt with in the preceding chapter, and, even earlier, in New- 
man's Grammar of Assent. This affiliation is indicated in 
Schiller's choice of the term Humanism as a badge for his phi- 
losophy; and it explains his frequent claim that pragmatism 
is primarily a method of truth only, which commits one to no 
specific metaphysical conclusions. Humanism means in a 
general way the grounding of knowledge in human nature, 
rather than in abstract principles. As such, it involves a variety 
of connected claims: — that thinking is a mode of conduct, an ex- 
pression of human living, and so to be understood only in con- 
nection with the specific situations it is intended to meet; that 



F. C. S. Schiller 363 

psychology, therefore, and not logic or dialectic solely, is essen- 
tial to its proper understanding; that the question of validity is 
not to be separated from that of genesis ; that the service which 
knowledge performs is a service to the entire man, so that moral 
and spiritual interests have the right to a word about its direc- 
tion, and the determination of its success; that as the life of 
man is practical and not primarily speculative, the foundations 
of knowledge rest on an active faith instead of on absolute and 
self-evident principles — are postulates rather than a priori axi- 
oms; and that, as against a ready-made, cut-and-dried, unpro- 
gressive knowledge, whose claim to our respect is its immo- 
bility and dogmatic certainty, the system of human truth is a 
plastic, growing organism, limited by no static facts at one 
end, and no static ideals at the other, and interested in the 
problem of changing the world and bettering man's lot, rather 
than in contemplating an eternal perfection. 

There is nothing so far that might not conceivably be ac- 
cepted by philosophers of a fairly wide variety of types. It is 
when we turn to a further claim, that what has popularly been 
attributed to pragmatism as its distinctive doctrine appears. 
In a general way, this may be put in the form of a contention 
that truth, or knowledge, is a creative act, to which reality 
itself is due. It is usually very difficult to determine, however, 
in just what sense such a claim is meant to be taken. If, as is 
possible, we could be supposed, when we talk about truth, to 
refer to no more than the growing content of human knowledge, 
most of the paradoxes of the pragmatist would turn into some- 
thing very like truisms. Everybody will admit that our actual 
knowledge is at best extremely partial, that it is dependent on 
practical interests, that it is constantly in process of growth 
and reconstruction. We may even say that reality grows with 
human knowledge, if we will agree to mean by reality only 
reality for us, — that is, the content in terms of which our human 
knowledge so far apprehgnds the real. But this is to make 
truth and reality no more than alternative expressions for one 



364 English and American Philosophy 

and the same thing; whereas reality may also, and commonly 
does, stand for a world of existences on which it is natural to 
say that our human thinking itself depends, and which it pre- 
supposes as its object. 

Now we ordinarily find it hard to suppose that this world 
changes just because we come to know it, — that the universe 
with its milky ways, and subterranean fires^nd its long evolu- 
tionary history, waits upon the appearance of human science 
before it claims the right to exist. There are various subsidiary 
ways indeed in which knowing changes reality. Every fact of 
knowing is an alteration in ourselves; it may lead to further 
changes in conduct, and thus indirectly modify even the object 
that it knows; and^as having a part in human intercourse, it 
perhaps may in an even more direct way influence the minds of 
other men. And all this is pertinent against a philosophy which 
denies the reality of change altogether, or the effectiveness of 
knowledge in bringing change about. But it does not advance 
a step toward refuting the common-sense belief that a world 
is there to be known which is not created by the knowing proc- 
ess; does pragmatism really have any quarrel with this claim or 
not? 

4. Schiller's own answer is wavering and evasive. Regarded 
as a method simply, pragmatism has no right to raise the ques- 
tion even, for the suggestion that reality has no further 
content than that of growing knowledge is plainly trespassing 
already on metaphysics. Nevertheless Schiller seems to be 
always on the point of saying, or of wanting to say, that knowl- 
edge creates reality in every sense. So, for example, he denies 
our right to urge against the pragmatist that mere knowing does 
not seem capable of altering reality, on the ground that "mere" 
knowing is an intellectualist abstraction, cognition being in- 
complete until it is discharged in action; ^ apart from a desire 
to refuse to knowledge any function whatever that stops short 
of altering the object, the resort to such an equivocation seems 

^Studies in Humanism, p. 440. 



F. C. S. Schiller 365 

unnecessary and hardly comprehensible. And there is one 
prominent feature in particular in his theory of knowledge 
which suggests strongly such an animus. 

This is the denial, many times repeated, that knowledge 
involves in any sense a "dualism," or the reference to an inde- 
pendent real. If knowledge literally brings into existence the 
ultimately real world, then the ground for this denial is ap- 
parent; but also it runs the risk of vindicating the creative 
function of knowledge at the expense of falling into solipsism. 
When pragmatism becomes logically most self-conscious, as 
in John Dewey, it is scrupulous not to allow for a moment the 
suggestion that a problem may exist about the connection of 
experience with reality beyond; the whole possibility is rigidly 
excluded from the mind, thereby at one blow ruling out a 
dualistic theory of knowledge, and — since the subjective, 
equally with the objective, is an aspect arising within experi- 
ence — evading the charge of subjectivity and solipsism. But 
Schiller is less wary in his tactics; and he does not hesitate to 
describe knowledge in a way that identifies it with distinctively 
human, and even individual experience, and that renders solip- 
sism confessedly a possible interpretation. The consequence 
is that while in words he more than once allows the intelligi- 
bility, and even the pragmatic value, of a belief in reality which 
our knowledge, at any rate, finds and does not create,^ he con- 
tinues to define knowledge itself in a way that makes the pos- 
sibility of this logically very doubtful; and the result is an 
almost insurmountable difficulty in finding for his utterances a 
single consistent interpretation. 

That other selves, at least, exist which are not created when 
we come to know them, Schiller seems to leave us in no doubt ; 
though to say that a pragmatic reason can be given for this 
belief, and that other selves are postulates necessary to our 
social needs, does not tell us how, after pragmatically affirming 
such existences, we can still continue to maintain that knowl- 
^ Ibid., pp. 201-2. 



366 English and American Philosophy 

edge creates the real world as it goes along, and carries no dualis- 
tic reference to independent being. About the world of nature, it 
is less easy to be sure of Schiller's attitude. Here also there is 
reason to suppose him ready at times to subscribe to the belief 
in a world evolving independently of human knowledge; but he 
persistently manages to keep this admission from coming face 
to face with the possibility, seemingly involved in it, that the 
immediate business of knowledge may be after all to describe 
reality faithfully, rather than to create it. Thus his doctrine of 
an original indeterminate vly\ as the stuff of reality, vacillates 
between psychology and metaphysics in a most elusive man- 
ner. As an account of the psychological growth of human life, 
it is intelligible to hold that we start with relatively unde- 
termined matter of experience, the raw material of a cosmos, 
and gradually mold this, under the lead of practical demands, 
into a more and more articulate, but, for us, always unfinished 
and growing world, the tools that make the organization pos- 
sible being themselves forged in the process. But what also 
we should like to know is, whether this process is the evolu- 
tion of the real world itself, or whether it is the evolution of 
our acquaintance with a world which has its own independent 
character; and if the last, then what alternative there is to 
the supposition that this character of things is reproduced for 
us, and not created, in true knowledge. Somehow this issue 
seems to slip from between our fingers, and we find ourselves 
engaged with a quite different question — whether the outer 
world may not itself have grown up through a process similar 
to our knowing process.^ This too is a legitimate metaphysical 
speculation; though in carrying us back to a limit of formless 
matter as the sufficient basis of the developing universe, it has 
a strong initial incredulity to overcome. But it is not the par- 
ticular question that needs answering. If by other beings a de- 
terminate structure of reality has already been brought about, 
which I have now to accept as limiting my possibilities of true 
^ Ibid., p, 446. 



F. C. S. Schiller 367 

belief, then the relation of my knowledge to this reality will in- 
volve more than Schiller's customary formula can include, and 
will negative the claims of knowledge to creative power in 
this particular respect. 

5. Meanwhile it is only fair to add that, while it does not 
help to clear up the metaphysical issue involved, Schiller's more 
paradoxical claims can be discounted in a measure by remem- 
bering his main polemical interests. For it is constantly appear- 
ing that when he argues against a reality that is independent, 
that undergoes no change when we come to know it, and that 
coerces true belief, he is really thinking only of one particular 
conception of reality. He is protesting first of all, that is, 
against the notion that reality as a whole is static, and our 
knowledge a useless addition to a world already perfect. Just as 
the English Hegelian instinctively translates all objections to 
his philosophy into terms of Humian sensationalism, so the 
pragmatist in turn is obsessed by Hegelian absolutism, and 
keeps swinging back to it as if it were the only rival in the 
field. The typical pragmatist is given to imputing "intellec- 
tualism" to his opponent as the theologian imputes vice; and 
thereby no doubt he makes his polemical task much easier. 
But between absolutism and an empirical dualism there is ab- 
solutely no necessary connection. How, we are asked, can 
knowledge on the one hand adjust itself to human demands and 
interests, and yet on the other slavishly copy and respectfully 
reproduce a congenitally outer and already preceding fact? 
The answer, when we do not insist on setting reality as a whole 
over against knowledge as a whole, appears simple enough. 
The reality which we profess to know is not the universe at 
large, but a particular piece of reality. And the claim that to 
know this truly one must think its actual features, and is frus- 
trated in this task if the knowing process alters it, is to leave 
the rest of the universe open to all the change you please, and 
even the particular object open to such future alteration as the 
truth we find out about it may enable us to effect. How indeed 



368 English and American Philosophy 

should we set about actually altering the world in practice, if 
knowledge could not put us in touch with the real facts of the 
situation we want to change? 

6. The uncertainties attaching to Schiller's doctrine do not 
on the whole seriously affect the force of his larger humanistic 
contentions. But one logical aspect of the matter ought not to 
be passed over, which does cast some doubt upon his use of 
pragmatism even as a method, in that it seems to minimize to an 
extent the necessity for a scrupulous logical conscience. The 
point has to do with a disposition to use the value of knowledge 
for forward-looking conduct to absolve us from the need of 
finding an answer to speculative perplexities. More especially 
do we find this attitude intruding in the metaphysical inter- 
pretation of the ultimate end of life, and so of reality, as a state 
of harmonious equipoise, in which activity has transcended time 
and change. That time and evolution present unsolved 
difficulties is not denied. But time is moving toward a future 
where it will pass into eternity. And when this consummation 
is effected, we shall no longer have any occasion to puzzle 
ourselves over problems that are now forever in the past; we 
shall have answered questions by having grown so well content 
as not to ask them.^ It would seem a logically more reputable 
plan to refuse, with other pragmatists, to recognize that specu- 
lative problems have even now a standing, than, once having 
granted their compulsion, to recommend that an answer be 
found through forgetting that they ever have been asked. 



§ 2. William James 

I. The philosophical significance of William James, the 
second, and in the eyes of the general public the most eminent 
of the pragmatists, is unusually difficult to appraise with con- 
fidence. Notwithstanding the fertility with which in his later 

^Ibid., pp. 198, 436. 



William James 369 

years he threw out one brilliant suggestion after another, these 
are seldom of a sort to be pinned down readily to a single un- 
ambiguous meaning; while to combine them into a systematic 
whole of doctrine is an almost hopeless task. On the whole, it 
is not unlikely that the contribution on which his fame will 
ultimately rest may turn out to be the earlier Psychology ; and 
in any case it is on flashes of psychological insight into the 
concrete workings of the hum-an mind, rather than on logically 
reasoned solutions of historic problems, that the value of his 
more ambitious speculative efforts depends. Keenly aware of ' 
his own temperamental demands upon the universe, *James set 
himself in particular to defend the rights of temperament, 
against the common profession on the part of the philosopher 
to be an impersonally accurate logical machine. This attitude 
was itself, he saw, one particular temperament among others — 
a temperament in which he did not himself find a great deal 
to admire. And by laying bare the meagreness of ordinary 
philosophical interests, and calling attention to new motives 
that conceivably have a right to satisfaction, James is able 
very frequently to approach traditional problems from a stand- 
point that is both novel and stimulating, even when his doctrinal 
outcome fails to produce conviction. 

2, It is hardly necessary to dwell upon James' contributions 
to psychology; the most important of them have entered into 
current thought, on its popular as well as on its more profes- 
sional side. Most pertinent to the general problems of phi-, 
losophy is the voluntaristic emphasis — the insistence, that is, 
upon the active side of conscious process in opposition to the 
older disposition to resort to a mechanical association of pas- 
sively received impressions; and on the central significance, 
therefore, of the biological organism with its equipment of 
specific instincts, and its relation to. the larger evolutionary 
process. What is essentially the same thing gets expression i 
on the inner side in the conception of a "stream of conscious- 
ness" — a continuum out of which elements are selected by 



370 English and American Philosophy 

their relevancy to the needs of hfe, instead of being given in 
their isolation at the start. One particularly significant aspect 
of this stream James brought to general notice in his doctrine 
of the "fringe" — a conception which has done service in calling 
attention not only to the subtler facts of "meaning," of feelings 
of tendency and direction, which James later utilizes in his 
epistemology, but, less directly, to the mysterious regions of 
the sub-conscious, on which he likewise draws for his inter- 
pretation of religion. 

3. In turning from psychology to the philosophical interests 
which occupied James' later life, and to which Pragmatism sup- 
plies a general title, one has to contend with the same elusive- 
ness in the meaning of the term as in the case of Schiller. Prag- 
matism is identified in the first place with Peirce's principle, 
as James interprets it at any rate, that there is no difference 
which does not make a difference, and that two statements 
really amount to the same thing unless they lead to significant 
consequences that can be distinguished. Go far, this is little 
more than a protest against unintelligent hair-splitting, and 
purely verbal subtleties that do not essentially further conduct ; 
it gives a method for determining what intellectual inquiries are 
practically worth pursuing, and so for weeding out useless con- 
troversy, rather than a definition of what truth consists in. 
It is not an infallible method by any means. For almost any 
logical distinction it may be possible to find some consequence 
that for some mind may assume a practical value; and between 
values it supplies no way of choice. If however it is held mod- 
estly, it does point a useful moral against the preoccupation 
with trivial matters of logic out of relation to vital human in- 
terests, and inculcate a practical sense of proportion which is 
one ingredient in the pragmatic temper of mind. The warning 
becomes shortsighted if it tries to frighten men off from sub- 
jects and problems that interest them, but do not happen to 
interest the critic; or from problems whose relevancy to human 
affairs does not at once strike the eye, but has partly to be 



William James 371 

taken on faith from their capacity to arouse this interest. 
Thus James' own preference for thick over thin philosophies 
is apt to mislead him into minimizing what is after all the use- 
ful habit of exact logical analysis, thereby affecting apprecia- 
bly the value of his efforts at philosophic construction. Never- 
theless in the large the pragmatic emphasis on the need of re- ' 
ferring all intellectual adventures to a connection with human 
life if they are to retain their zest and their significance, seems 
deserving of approval. 

4. Closely tied up with this is a second point — the vindica- '; 
tion of the right to extend belief beyond definite evidence, 
where important issues of life are at stake. James' essay on 
the Will to Believe has become a classical document for this 
tendency in modem thought. The title may however help con- 
vey a wrong impression of the degree of James' own heterodoxy. 
As a matter of fact the doctrine is carefully qualified, and 
stands not in the least for a right to believe whatever our whim 
suggests. It applies only to convictions that deal with momen- 
tous issues, where intellectual reasons are insufficient to settle 
the matter either way, and where, again, the issue is "forced," 
so that to withhold decision is equally to lose the advantages 
that would follow, if the belief were a true one, from accepting 
it. It is better, that is, to risk being mistaken, than to give ' 
up the chance of truth through an exaggerated notion of the 
wickedness of error; in knowledge, as elsewhere, courage and 
the readiness to take a sporting chance are conditions of at- 
taining the good. Meanwhile there is nothing in this to make 
it necessary to suppose that judgments are constituted true by 
their satisfaction of desire; indeed, the insistence that we gain 
the right to believe under the lead of desire only as we are 
ready to assume a personal risk, would have no meaning were 
not the facts what they are independent of the belief. There 
are cases, indeed, where the very acceptance of a belief may 
itself make the belief come true; but these are quite simple 
and commonplace. As a belief that something is going to hap- 



'^y^ English and American Philosophy 

pen is literally made true when the expectation is fulfilled, so 
a faith in the possibility of such a future fact may help to 
bring the fact about. But it is only to the belief in a future 
event, to what I can do or effect, that this applies in any 
case; and meanwhile the act always has determining conditions 
which stand on a wholly different footing. If I judge a chasm 
to be five feet wide when in reality it is ten, this belief does 
not make itself come true, nor does it increase my chance of 
getting across safely; and even the self-confident estimate of 
my powers works only within narrow limits, and may lead to 
rash enterprises and to consequent calamity. 

5. A third significant motive, which also is involved in 
James' treatment of the knowledge problem, gets expression in 
the insistent demand for a world which leaves room for effort 
and experiment, for real adventure, and real danger, and real 
possibility of choice, — a world which does not weigh upon our 
spirits as an enveloping and stifling fate, but which is loosely 
articulated, and responsive to our endeavor to alter it. This 
antipathy to the block universe of monism and determinism 
is what lends to James' pages much of their freshness and their 
stimulating character, as the antithesis of that reverence for 
established values of which English Hegelianism is the mouth- 
piece; its interest in the specific and irreducible qualities of 
things, its conviction that evils are really evil and not to be 
treated gently because they are entrenched in reality or the 
Absolute, its respect for the individual man and his personal 
efforts, for experimentalism, and the right to override the im- 
pressiveness of institutions and traditions — all this represents 
what may fairly be called the distinctively American note in 
his philosophy. While, however, this suggests metaphysical 
novelties in plenty, in that it takes seriously time and flow, real 
change, real novelty, real chance within the limits of choices 
that concretely touch the will, it implies again no single un- 
ambiguous theory of truth. All that it calls for is a sort of uni- 
verse in which evils may be got rid of, and growing ideals may 



William James 373 

stand a chance of being realized; and for this a different ac- 
count of knowledge might equally provide. 

6, The prestige that comes from whatever truth may lie 
in the preceding considerations must then be dispensed with 
before we can estimate the claim of pragmatism to be regarded 
as a distinctive new philosophy; and it remains to ask more pre- 
cisely what such a claim amounts to. There are at least three 
possibilities that can be dealt with more or less in separation, 
though in James' own treatment they are constantly mingled. 
One fairly intelligible meaning, to begin with, grows out of 
the suggestions of scientific method. A scientific theory may 
be regarded as a methodological device for handling more 
compendiously the data of experience; and so regarded, many 
of James' contentions will apply to it in a quite literal sense. 
A theory is indeed true only as it works, since its whole claim 
rests upon its capacity for working; it is shown to be valid 
not by its success in copying an independent reality, but by 
leading us to expect consequences that actually arrive, or, at 
the least, by bringing the facts already known into intelligible 
relations. We have no particular reason to imagine that there 
exists in nature the peculiar concatenation of abstract char- 
acters which our hypotheses represent; relationships sup- 
posedly are really there to be discovered, but they are hardly 
there in the form of conceptual shorthand. Scientific 
hypotheses are of human creation, the accumulation of man's 
intellectual inventions; and they are never final in the sense 
that their formulas are open to no further change. 

But now a theory about theories ought not to be allowed to 
usurp the sole title to the name of truth without remonstrance. 
To know reality does not mean exclusively that we are engaged 
in constructing hypotheses to account for reality. Strictly it 
is the term validity that ought to be applied to the effectiveness 
of a hypothetical method of reaching some result, intellectual 
or practical, in which we take an interest. But validity itself 
presupposes a different sense in which we can be said to know. 



374 English and American Philosophy 

It presupposes an existing situation in which there are agents, 
needs to be satisfied, conditions that render the satisfaction 
attainable, intellectual constructs intended to serve as instru- 
ments; and unless this is conceived realistically, jind not itself 
pragmatically, the whole outlook becomes a shifting mirage, 
needs of conduct blend with the needs of philosophic inter- 
pretation, and language utterly refuses to stand for anything 
permanent enough to last even to the end of our discourse. 
The thinking process through which hypotheses are formed 
needs from start to finish to draw upon a concrete imaginative 
realization of things and events in their own nature; ideas as 
symbols or plans of action are helpless apart from ideas as 
the essences of real objects. If this imaginative commerce with 
things absent is not to be called knowledge, by what title ought 
it to go? In spite of all James can adduce to render plausible 
the claim that thought adds to reality instead of reproducing it, 
in the end he always comes up against facts that are recalci- 
trant. My thought adds to a starry constellation a name which 
was not there previously — this is true, but trivial. I mark out 
this group artificially from the rest of the firmament, and num- 
ber the stars by counting them; and perhaps neither God nor 
man had ever made the selection or the count before. But the 
stars are there to be counted, as James has to confess, and the 
number is there to be discovered; and to say that our knowl- 
edge agrees with what already preexisted, but does not copy it, 
is to make a distinction without any real difference.^ 

7. Meanwhile the conception of knowledge as hypothetical 
shorthand is used by James interchangeably with a somewhat 
different notion, which comes much closer to the popular un- 
derstanding of pragmatism as the identification of truth with 
satisfying consequences. This is the notion of a "plan of ac- 
tion." An explanatory h3q3othesis may perhaps be called a plan 
of action in a loose and general way; but it is not what the 
phrase would of itself suggest to most readers. A purpose is 
^Pragmatism, pp. 2.';2 ff. ; Meaning of Truth, pp. 92 ff. 



William James 375 

indeed involved in scientific explanation — a purpose satisfied 
by the intellectual consequence of finding your data intelligibly 
accounted for in your formula; and if the doctrine of "conse- 
quences" is sufficiently covered by a definition of truth as that 
answer to a specific problem which the "total drift of thinking 
tends to confirm," few philosophers probably would take ex- 
ception to it. But this falls a good deal short of what James 
elsewhere leads us to expect. Indeed if he allows that the 
satisfaction of understanding rightly is enough to make knowl- 
edge pragmatic, no pratical difference of any importance would 
seem to remain between pragmatism and intellectualism, since 
the intellectualist on his part has seldom had any objection to 
admitting that knowledge has also practical uses, so long as 
he is allowed to make knowing itself a distinctive aim; and ac- 
cordingly on pragmatic principles the two philosophies would 
be shown to be identical. What James has seemed often to be 
sa5dng is, that thought is for the sake of action ulterior to 
itself, and so that it is these further consequences that really 
count. Of course it may be said that pure science, as experi- 
mental, itself passes into action, in that it is constantly apply- 
ing its theories to new cases. But nevertheless its interest in 
these is not as a means of satisfying more ultimate human pur- 
poses; it is in their power to verify the formula. The new fact 
is not the end at which thought aims, but only one more datum, 
having a peculiar strategic value, to be fitted into the hy- 
pothesis; and the distinctive satisfaction still remains the in- 
tellectual one of marrying previously known facts with further 
facts. It is possible that pragmatism might be interpreted to 
mean no more than this, and that when we say that truth con- 
sists in consequences, we are merely intending to maintain that 
an h5^othesis is not justified in stopping with its own first for- 
mulation, however well this may seem to explain the data so 
far known, but should be applied in a way to show that it 
is capable of covering as many new facts as we are able by 
active experiment to uncover. But here there is no distinctive 



376 English and American Philosophy 

theory of knowledge involved, since everyone worth con- 
vincing is already convinced in the abstract that no hypothesis 
can be accepted as true unless it can hold out against any 
further facts that later on turn up. 

It seems difficult not to suppose, then, that there is one strain 
in James' account of truth which tends to identify it with prac- 
tical as distinct from speculative satisfaction ; a thing is true 
so long as it is profitable to us, or affords us emotional gratifica- 

[tion. Of course James cannot be supposed to have any real 
notion of maintaining that we are to believe anything we choose 
to believe because it would be pleasant to do so. For the 
most part it is not the good of believing, but the good of 
acting on belief, to which his theory points us; and if we were 
to insist that all beliefs be acted on fully and consistently, 
and that all the consequences be taken into account, the prac- 
tical danger from rash belief would be negligible. Only such 
beliefs as cannot be tested directly by consequences in the 
natural world would be left to the test merely of emotional 
satisfaction; and the right to extend belief here James has 
already and less paradoxically defended. Nevertheless his 

\wvrds do sometimes seem to say that any degree of satis- 
factoriness aimed at and secured constitutes a belief true. 
Thus in a well-known passage where he concedes even to the 
Absolute a certain significance, as furnishing the occasion for 

I a moral holiday, this conception of the Absolute he calls in so 

ifar true, even while he adds that he himself prefers not to 
accept this truth because for him it comes into conflict with 
other truths. The greatest enemy of any one of our truths 
.piay be the rest of our truths, he goes on to say, in answer to 
the charge that pragmatism gives us the right to believe what- 
ever we please.^ The ordinary man would find no difficulty in 
admitting that, for particular purposes, a belief which it is our 
duty to reject might be more or less useful, or satisfying; but 
when this is called a true belief, he is apt to feel that liberties 
* Pragmatism, p. 78. 



William James 377 

are being taken with his parts of speech. What James prob- 
ably has in mind is not a true belief, but a belief fkat something 
is true; and that there is a close connection between satisfac- 
tion and belief will no doubt be found in some significant sense 
to be the case. 

8. The third interpretation which James gives to the prag- 
matic conception of knowledge is altogether the most clear-cut 
and distinctive one. It is his own special contribution to the 
problem; and though it connects only somewhat loosely with 
the preceding considerations, it has a highly important bear- 
ing on other and more metaphysical doctrines with which his 
interest became increasingly identified. The theory, briefly 
stated, is as follows: Knowledge is a function of experience, f-^ 
a particular sort of relation between its terms. When I say i 
that I know an object, what I really mean is that some present 
fact of experience has the power, by a series of continuous 
transitions, to lead me to the actual presence of the object — 
to the perceptual experience, namely, which is the object's pres- 
ence. Knowledge is thus an affair wholly of transitions and ' 
leadings within experience. And whenever any idea thus leads 
to an end term which is found to be satisfying, in that it carries 
the sense of being the goal toward which the process has been 
aiming, it thereby becomes true. Truth is successful func- 
tioning or pointing in this particular form; by the very fact 
of a satisfactory completion, the starting point becomes a 
knower, the terminus an object known. The idea may be a 
copy of its object, or the two may have practically nothing 
in common; the point is immaterial so long as the trail leads 
us to our destination. 

The chief plausibility of the transition-feeling theory of 
knowledge lies in the fact that it offers a concrete analysis of 
the act of "pointing," or "referring" to an object. A mere 
image has, as we look at it, no discoverable self-transcendence 
or inner duplicity; it is simply what it is. And yet in knowl-i' _ 
edge the idea does evidently somehow connect with what lies J 



37^ English and American Philosophy 

^.beyond its own boundaries. Three alternatives are open. We 
may leave the fact a sheer mystery ; or we may appeal to some 
outside agent, like Royce's Absolute, to do the connecting; or, 
with James, we may add to the existence of the image a further 
"function," And how, James asks, can such a function be con- 
ceived, if not as a power of leading, of getting us to the object 
of our cognitive interest? And if knowledge is thus only a 

j function, then truth must be definable in terms of successful 
^ I functioning, and consequences, in the form of a satisfactory 

( issue, will constitute its essential nature. 

9. The first comment that seems called for here has to 
do with a point already dwelt upon in other connections. 
James' description simply does not cover certain things which 
the term knowledge has always been understood to imply. 
There is indeed one harmless meaning which there is no occa- 
sion to dispute. It is only at the termination of the process of 
verification, James remarks, that we know jor certain; and if 
we mean by truth only what is known of a certainty to be true, 
no empiricist at least need hesitate to identify this with truth 
that has been verified. But it still remains open to question 
it: whether the verifying process constitutes the claim to be true, 
or only substantiates it. When we speak of verifying truth, 
we surely do not mean to speak of verifying our verification. 
James' speech is all the time betraying him; thus when he 

j remarks that the pragmatist cannot warrant the judgment that 
.^ 'his own theory is true really, but can only believe it,'^ clearly the 
belief attaches to something other than the warrant he con- 
fesses he cannot obtain. 

And what this something is, is reasonably simple; it is not 
that a certain consequence is going to happen, but that a cer- 
4! tain situation has as a matter of fact a specific nature char- 
acterized by specific qualities and relations. And the verifi- 
cation, if it comes, is simply a way of making me feel certain 
that I was right in affirming this character. The realities, to 

^Meaning of Truth, p. 213. 



William James 379 

quote James himself again, are believed only because their 
notions appear trae, and their notions appear true only because 
they work satisfactorily; this does not mean that the notions 
appear to work satisfactorily because they work satisfactorily. 
And indeed if it were not for the confusion which his own con- 
flicting utterances introduce, it would not be necessary to labor 
the matter, since on occasion James concedes all that there 
is any need to claim. That truth is predetermined by the 
event's nature, that the existence of the object is the only rea- 
son in innumerable cases why the idea does work successfully, , 
that an enormous quantity of truth may be written down as* 
having preexisted to its perception by us humans, that if an 
h5^othesis is satisfactory we must believe it to have been true 
anteriorly to its formulation by ourselves ^ — all this is far more« 
easily intelligible on the supposition that truth is an affirmation I "f- 
of character, than on the supposition that it is a process of 
verification. 

10. If now we are prepared to take these last expressions 
seriously, a perplexity confronts James' doctrine. If knowl- 
edge makes a genuine claim to reach out beyond the limits of 
the knowing experience, and to grasp by anticipation the true 
nature of reality not present, — not merely future experiences 
that are going to connect on to my present one through a series 
of felt transitions, but, conceivably, any sort of reality any- 
where in the universe, — is the machinery for this provided in 
his description of the knowing process? On the surface this 
description, if taken without qualification, limits knowledge!- 
to the series of transitive facts that constitute some specific 
knowing experience, and to the sort of unity we commonly call 
psychological; and in that case it becomes incumbent to ex-/ 
plain how it escapes the traditional difficulties of subjectivism. 

As a preliminary to answering this question, it is necessary 
to say a word first about the wider metaphysical setting in 
which James' theory of knowing is intended to play a part. 

^Radical Empiricism, pp. 252, 254. Meaning of Truth, p. xv. 



380 English and American Philosophy 

[The doctrine of radical empiricism, to an interest in which 
James came to subordinate even pragmatism, has indeed, as 
will be noticed presently, pragmatic consequences, especially 
in the field of religion; but in itself it is a metaphysical doc- 
trine quite as technical as most metaphysics, and as far re- 
moved from immediate ends of human living. It stands in 
the first place for the belief that "experience" is a self-sustain- 
ing reality leaning on nothing more ultimate for its support. 
It is made up of no one peculiar stuff, psychical or otherwise, 
but of as many kinds of stuff as the world actually presents, 
each precisely what it is experienced as; each bit joins on to 
its nearest neighbor, and through the whole run innumerable 
threads of relationship. But the continuities, too, are to be 
taken for just what we find them to be, and nothing more; 
and no particular kind of unity is absolute and all-embracing. 
The bearings of this are best understood in terms of alter- 
native doctrines which it denies. Thus the needlessness of ap- 
pealing to anything extraneous to hold experience together, is a 
repudiation on the one hand of the "soul" of everyday belief, 
— for which James' early physiological training seems to have 
given him a special antipathy, — and, on the other, of the 
eternal relating principle to which the absolutists appealed. 
Meanwhile the term "radical" is meant to correct the error 
into which earlier empiricists had fallen, in reducing experi- 
ence to its substantive or sensational features alone, and failing 
to see that the connective tissue of experience, its transitions 
and relations, are equally real as immediate facts of feeling. 
II. Into this field of pure experience knowledge, in terms 
of the feelings of transition whose absence had been responsible 
for the atomic sensationalism of the older psychology, enters 
to assume the role of the unifying agents that have been de- 
posed — the soul, the transcendental ego, and, as a final sub- 
limation, consciousness. At least James assigns it this role. 
But a closer scrutiny reveals certain obscurities in his posi- 
tion. Even as a substitute for the soul or self, knowledge fails 



William James 381 

to serve entirely the purpose for which the self traditionally 
had been invoked ; and it seems to serve this purpose only be- 
cause James throws together two quite distinct questions. How 
can one thing know another? — this is the proper question of 
knowledge. But in resorting to knowledge in order to replace 
the self, this turns insensibly into the very different question, 
How can the various elements of experience be united to form 
a conscious unity? The confusion is encouraged by James' 
disposition to use the terms knowledge and consciousness as 
synonymous. Now all the elements in the experience of a self 
may intelligibly be held to be co-conscious; but not all these 
elements belong to the series of felt transitions to which know- 
ing has been reduced. To say nothing of the feelings and emo- 
tions, there are sensations and images also that stand apart 
from the conscious sense of meaning and direction; they are 
irrelevant to our central purposes, and drift languidly at the 
edge of the current, as in the case of many of our fancies, or 
are submerged in the obscurity of the "fringe." Knowledge 
at best, therefore, only very partially explains the unity of a 
self. James has, it is true, another theory to fall back on here, 
a theory dating back to the days of the Psychology, but utilized 
off and on in his later writings also. For this, each passing 
thought or pulse of experience is a knower which turns past 
pulses into the content of a single unitary stream, by appro- 
priating them, and then passing on its inheritance to the next 
succeeding thought. But the situation is not bettered by hav- 
ing two alternative explanations of doubtful consistency with 
one another; for the knower conceived as a memory act through 
which the present experience attaches to its train past ex- 
periences that can never be recalled, — granting that this is 
an account of knowledge at all, — is clearly different from a 
knower constituted such by the ability to lead through a series 
of real transitions to a future state destined to be also real. 
12. The transition theory of knowledge is, accordingly, in- 
competent to take the place of "consciousness" as an explana- 



382 English and American Philosophy 

tion of the psychological unity of experience, since it covers only 
a portion of this experience content. And when we turn to 
knowledge in its proper sense, as transcending in range of con- 
tent such a psychological whole, the difficulties are multiplied. 
The world of pure experience is, it has appeared, a world of 
empirical natures, each precisely what it is experienced as, 
and having innumerable lines of connection. Now these rela- 
tionships within pure experience are only to a very minor 
degree identical with the serial transitions that constitute know- 
ing. Any particular bit of experience may become known by 
being made the terminus of a knowing process; but it has 
at the same time many other relationships that are not cogni- 
tive. This indeed supplies the basis of one of the chief merits 
that James attributes to his theory; it is devised not only to 
get rid of a unifying self, or substratum, or agent, but also 
of that dualism between perception and physical object which 
has vexed philosophers. For the perceptual experience is the 
object in a particular context; the percept of a tree, and the 
physical tree, are one and the same bit of pure experience taken 
twice over, once in connection with a series of changes that be- 
long to my personal life history, once in connection with per- 
sisting or continuous experience that makes up the growth of 
the tree as a natural object, and its contemporaneous spatial 
and causal relationships with the environment. 

Radical empiricism takes for granted, then, the entire world 
that constitutes the stock in trade of human intercourse, not 
the world of psychological connections merely. But while we 
may have the right thus to postulate the real world, without 
waiting to deduce it from a theory about the possibilities of 
knowledge, at least one is called upon to show that he is as- 
suming nothing which his theory of knowledge will not allow 
him to believe in when this too comes to be added to his 
system. And whether 'James' theory can meet this test suc- 
cessfully is very much open to doubt. Percept and object, we 
have been told, are the same identical fact in different con- 



William James 383 

texts. But knowledge is defined as belonging only to one of 
these contexts, the psychological one; how then can we "know" 
the other? The tree in its physical context involves elements 
of pure experience in which our present knowing thought does 
not terminate. They are, but they are not experienced in the 
way of knowing; how accordingly do we get the right to speak 
of them? It is only within the range of our experience that, 
for us, felt transitions occur; anything that is not an actual 
object of perception is literally separated by a gap, with all 
transitive intermediaries lacking. James' own answer to the 
objection misses its point completely. The answer is, that 
while it is true that in many cases our thought does not actually 
terminate in its object, it does terminate in something in the 
neighborhood of its object — its associates, or its results, or its 
causes; and since in this way we are enabled to control the 
object, the pragmatic consequences are the same as if we were 
dealing with it directly. Now it is quite true that nothing 
has reality for our knowledge apart from some point of attach- 
ment which it gets to objects of immediate sense experience; 
a past event in history, for example, must have had effects 
embodied in some actual present form of existence, to allow it 
to be brought in contact with us at all. And these nearer as- 
sociates may often serve our practical purposes sufficiently. 
But the question is not how, presupposing a competence to 
refer in thought to objects which "experience" does not reach, 
we are able to think of certain objects rather than of others, 
but how this presupposed recognition of a transcendent object 
is possible at all if knowing is nothing but a series of experi- 
enced transitions that have reached their goal. James im- 
ports his own knowledge of the situation into the mind of 
the knower himself, when the whole point of the criticism is 
that on his own showing there is no way for it to get there. 
At best all that James' theory provides for is a feeling of in- 
completeness in the cognitive series, as if something more were 
needed to round it out; and such a blind and inarticulate sense 



384 English and American Philosophy 

of groping, of which the hunting for a lost name might 
serve as an example, has little in common with the experi- 
ence of meaning in thought a definite object, recognized in 
terms of its specific nature. It is hard to avoid the suspicion 
that 'James at times is even resorting to a purely verbal trick, 
and that when he talks of the "discontinuity" experience which 
I cannot avoid having when I try to make the transition, say, 
from my experience to yours, and fail in the attempt, this feel- 
ing of a gap is itself taken as a felt transition which serves to 
bridge the gap.^ But of course it does nothing of the sort. If 
I can be said to have a feeling of unlikeness, or of discontinuity, 
in passing from a direct acquaintance with my own life to the 
less vivid thought of another man's inner self, such an ex- 
perienced relation holds only between my experience and this 
thought; that oj which I think still remains a thing outside 
any unity of immediate experience for me. 

As a matter of fact James' case is still worse than the pre- 
ceding criticism has implied; it is not even clear how it can 
account for knowledge where the felt transitions are completed. 
Strictly, if we follow James' account, we have no right to talk 
of knowing an object until the object ]& there bodily in experi- 
ence; but then the earlier stage will no longer be present to 
constitute it known, and it will be no more than itself existing 
as a bit of pure experience. At best, — unless, as indeed James 
seems at times actually to imply, knowing be regarded as not 
in itself an experiencing at all, but only the impersonal fact 
that some later experience is on the way,- — the knower can 
only be the pure experience just preceding, and the experience 
can only know its immediate successor; but this is wholly out 
of relation to what concretely we mean by knowledge. It is 
absurd to say that I do not know — cannot think of truly — 
a future event, but only know the first step necessary to lead 
me to that event, which first step then knows the second, and 

^Radical Empiricism, p. 49. 'Ibid., p. 57. 



William James 385 

so on. It is possible however to see why the absurdity fails 
to strike James, if we turn back to the confusion of 
problems already noted. For if we are trying to explain, 
not how one thing can know another, but how it can be 
joined to another in an experienced unity, then of course it 
is only two immediately contiguous elements that thus flow 
together. 

13. It remains to notice briefly the pragmatic consequences 
which specially recommend radical empiricism to James' mind. 
And here things take a rather curious turn. The ultimate mo- 
tive to which James confesses for his final philosophic prefer- 
ences is the religious one; epistemological dualism, and theism, 
and souls, separate us from God, and thwart the craving for 
immediate union and identity with the divine. The fact is 
curious because it is dearly on the road to that ideal of unity 
toward which, as a critic of absolutism, James had seemed to 
show dislike rather than sympathy. This reversal of attitude 
has two main aspects. The first is speculative, and centers 
about the notion of the "compounding" of consciousness. A 
logical difficulty here had always troubled James, and in the 
Psychology had led him to repudiate entirely the belief that 
separate mental states can be brought together into a unity. 
Nor, he frankly admits, has his difficulty been resolved; and 
if he now feels justified in disregarding it, and following the 
religious instinct, it is simply that he has taken heart from 
Bergson, and is prepared to abandon logic. To estimate fairly 
this apparently desperate course would need a detailed study; 
probably it is not as bad as it sounds. James' explanation of 
his meaning seems to reduce it to a denial of the possibility of 
manipulating the abstract concepts of the one and the many 
so as to restore their fluidity, and generate out of them the 
reality of a many-in-oneness. We cannot explain conceptually 
houf the many can be one, but can only dip back into the flow 
of immediate experience itself, and find that the fact is so; 



386 English and American Philosophy 

and in repudiating logic, we are simply giving up the at- 
tempt of philosophers to construct reality out of static con- 
cepts.^ 

But here, as frequently, James fails to distmguish two very 
different things. As .his discussion proceeds, it is apparent that 
what for the most part he is thinking of is the standing of 
that sort of unity which each man knows as a fact in his own 
conscious experience. Even here an ambiguity is present. The 
inclusiveness of my conscious life, whether in terms of what is 
there at a given moment, or of the union of successive moments, 
does not need to imply "compounding," as if things previously 
existing in separation were brought together; the facts would 
equally be satisfied by supposing that outside this growing 
and expanding unity the experiences do not exist at all, though 
other experiences more or less similar to them may. James' 
new doctrine seems to imply that each addition to my unified 
life was already waiting outside the door for a chance to enter, 
like a persisting physical element which forms fresh combina- 
tions with other elements; and this there is nothing in the 
situation to render necessary, or even plausible. But in any 
case the acceptance of a continuity of consciousness does not 
remove the most serious objection to a unity of God and man; 
much more important logically is the difficulty of understand- 
ing how, if my life is a part of God's life, it can, not at some 
previous moment before it has been appropriated, but at the 
same identical moment, be one thing for me, and quite another 
for him. This is not, as James seems to suppose, a difficulty 
raised by a conceptual logic, through its insistence that a term 
cannot be in two different relations without becoming intrinsi- 
cally a different term — a difficulty capable of being settled by 
an appeal to fact. On the contrary, it is itself based on a mat- 
ter of fact — that certain specifiable aspects of experience are 
actually incompatible with a more inclusive unity of conscious- 

^ PluraUstk Universe, pp. 281, 287; Some Problems of Philosophy, 
pp. 81, 97. 



William James 387 

ness; ignorance, for example, cannot enter into the wider con- 
text of knowledge, and still remain itself. 

14. More interesting however than this logical question, is 
the change in spirit which James' new position involves, and 
the disappearance of that insistent demand for novelty, for 
freedom, for pluralistic independence, of which he had made 
himself the spokesman. For such a recompounding of existing 
bits of flat experience is as stale and unprofitable as the 
recombining of atoms, though the patterns may be more 
variegated. And say what we will, to begin to make terms with 
a panpsychist philosophy like that of Fechner, is to move 
inevitably in the direction of binding all the things that really 
count for us together in the unity of a single whole. If there 
is a great reservoir in which the memories of earth's inhabitants 
are pooled and preserved; if consciousness preexists already 
behind the scenes coeval with the world, and is not generated 
de novo in a vast number of places; if it is only the phenom- 
enal interposition of a brain or nervous system that gives to 
experience its various special forms, and separates it into parts; 
if I in my apparent individuality am only a marginal content 
of a greater self, my energies the overflow from its superfluity, 
and my new experiences a shifting of the threshold ; if the ideal 
of truth, of satisfying knowledge, is a total conflux of mind 
with reality,^ — how are we any more virtuous than the idealist 
and the absolutist? James continues to insist that the day is 
saved so long as the unity is not a//-inclusive, and some portions 
of experience are left outside God's life.^ And this does preserve 
one speculative advantage; if God is not literally the whole, 
he has a chance to escape responsibility for evil. But at best, 
in falling back on this, all the pragmatic motives are transferred 
to an Olympian world. It is for the life of God, or of the Gods, 
that freedom, and pluralism, and a loose universe are saved; 

'^Pluralistic Universe, pp. 2qo, 29g; Human Immortality, pp. 23, 27, 

Sl-2. 

'Pluralistic Universe, pp. 125, 294, 312. 



388 English and American Philosophy 

meanwhile our human world falls wholly within the embrace 
of a wider spirit, even though not an infinite one. In thus 
consenting to sacrifice the autonomy and independence and 
creativeness of man to the craving for a mystical and religious 
union with the divine, James comes so close after all to the 
absolutism of Royce, that it is hard to detect differences of 
pragmatic importance. 

§ 3. John Dewey 

I. In turning to John Dewey, the third of the leading ex- 
ponents of pragmatism, the puzzling mixture of motives which 
has so far complicated the task of exposition is no longer con- 
spicuously in evidence. The difficulties here lie rather in cer- 
tain subtleties in the attitude itself. As in the case of Idealism, 
though along very different lines, the strategy of Dewey's cam- 
paign lies in a flanking movement, which aims not so much 
to solve traditional problems as to render them meaningless, 
and undeserving of serious attention. And first accordingly 
it will be useful to indicate again the standpoint that will be 
presupposed as a background in the account which follows, 
especially since this does not receive a very sympathetic treat- 
ment at Dewey's hands. 

There are three easily distinguishable problems that might be 
set for the philosopher by different aspects of the knowledge sit- 
uation, if we take the familiar starting point of everyday belief. 
This without any question holds that knowledge is an act per- 
formed by some particular human individual, in his endeavor 
to make himself acquainted with a surrounding world with 
which it is to his interest to come to terms. The enterprise he 
carries on through the medium of his own perceptions cind 
thoughts and ideas, — his own in some sense, in spite of the un- 
doubted fact that what he is perceiving or thinking about is 
reality itself, and not his private thoughts or sensations. Now 
the problem of epistemology in the narrowest sense has to do 



John Dewey 389 

simply with the implications of this apparent fact that the 
knowing diought and the object known are not one thing but 
two, that knowing is always man's knowing, and that man 
himself is very obviously only a minor part of the real world 
that forms the object of knowledge. 

With the dualism that on the surface seems to be involved 
here, modern philosophy has wrestled long and impatiently. 
In the determination not to accept it as it stands, it first experi- 
mented in every possible direction with an idealistic solution, 
which aimed to overcome the dualism by denying reality to 
an independent object. And accordingly in absolute idealism, 
where the aim was most successfully carried out, the episte- 
tnological problem takes on an entirely new meaning, by con- 
necting itself with a different, though equally real, aspect of 
the knowledge situation. Here knowledge is interpreted, 
namely, in terms wholly of the relational or descriptive content 
in which for purposes of thought the "character" of true reality 
is found. The idealists never quite succeeded in putting 
wholly out of sight the fact that this is a content judged to 
be the character of reaUty by a human knower; but by throw- 
ing all the weight of eulogistic emphasis on the eternal nature 
of the what of knowledge, and by making much of the merely 
temporal and empirical and imperfect character of the finite 
knower and his knowing act, they manage to leave the impres- 
sion that this last is too insignificant to be allowed to divert 
us from the grander spectacle of an absolute and timeless whole 
of truth. However, this is an evasion, which still leaves the 
problem of the individual knower in the background. In 
Dewey, a further step is taken in the form of an explicit and 
logically defended denial that experience attaches to an experi- 
encer, or knower, in any sense; and he does this by limiting 
his account of knowledge to still a third aspect, distinguishable 
alike from the act of external reference, and from the ex- 
plication of logical content. 

2. This aspect is the active process of thinking, or judging. 



390 English and American Philosophy 

Dewey sets out to shov/, in opposition primarily to the idealist's 
preoccupation with a finished logical system, that knowledge as 
logical content is subordinate to knowledge as a functional part 
of experience. We think not for the sake of thinking, but as 
a stage in the business of living. Reason is not something 
handed down from above to constitute experience rational; 
it is something that happens to experience under certain de- 
finable conditions. So long as life moves smoothly, we do 
not think — we act. It is only when the impulses that normally 
lead to action conflict with one another, and the issue becomes 
confused and doubtful, that we have to call a halt to the im- 
mediate business of living and enjoying, and turn our attention 
rather to the means of reconstructing our interrupted activity. 
This last is what constitutes the special phase of experience 
which we call thinking, and with which the term knowledge 
is now exclusively to be identified. In such a mediating proc- 
ess, a diremption of experience for the first time comes about. 
On the one hand there emerges the "fact," the object, the datum, 
— those elements of the situation, namely, the outcome of 
past experience crystallized in habit, which, while they are not 
final, else the need for reconstruction would not have arisen, 
are yet sufficiently stable for us to count upon them for the mo- 
ment, and look to them to furnish the material out of which the 
new and desired method of control can be constructed. And on 
the other hand there is the concept or idea, which, on the basis 
of the given, attempts, in the form of an hypothesis or plan 
of action, to effect this reconstruction. And the validity or 
truth of the idea is reducible therefore to its success or failure 
in the task; "that which guides us truly, is true." 

The articulated logical content of science which idealism 
had exalted as the supreme end of knowledge, is, accordingly, 
nothing final; it stands only for the advisability of providing 
instruments for the control of conduct before the immediate 
need actually arises. The business of science is to analyze the 
given, with the intent of discovering cues to action more de- 



John Dewey 391 

pendable than those which a crude unanalyzed experience can 
supply. It is most useful that this specialized business should 
be turned over to the professional thinker, who thus may ap- 
pear to be interested in thought for its own sake. But the 
justification for his work is nevertheless always the service 
to which it can be put for the needs of conduct in the concrete; 
and what he discovers is not final "truth," but simply a set 
of tools that have to be applied to this or that particular situ- 
ation before anything deserving to be called truth arises. For 
the true object of the judgment is always, in the end, a prac- 
tical issue, relating to what we are called upon to do; knowing 
has reference only to the future, and is neither a contemplative 
survey of existence, nor the working out of a timeless dialectical 
process. 

And here comes in the fundamental motive of Dewey's whole 
philosophy; it is an attempt to furnish a sound logical basis 
for progress — ^progress in the individual, but still more in the 
social world. Pragmatism is an experimental use of intelligence 
to liberate and liberalize action. It looks to a growing rather 
than a static world ; thinking is not the reduplication of reality 
already complete, but the actual method of social advance, a 
method that is to free us alike from the unchanging ideals of 
obscurantism, and from the spasmodic demand for novelty or 
freedom, working under no principle of control from the past. 
It is the logic of rational evolution, where, along with a con- 
stant alertness to the novelties in the situation, and an ab- 
sence of undue subservience to the past, the new is at the same 
time connected with the old in an orderly and sober fashion. 

3. If it is really so that the object of thought is always an 
end of action, or an ideal, there is plausibility in the claim 
that it is progressively constructed by the thinking process, 
instead of being present all along as a ready-made standard by 
which thought constructs are externally measured. Here is 
precisely the quarrel between the conservative and the liberal 
or radical temper. Liberalism, if it is to be effective, is com- 



392 English and American Philosophy 

mitted to the logic of a social end which is not a blanket con- 
cept unambiguously given once for all, and calling upon us 
merely to square each new act with it conscientiously; this 
is, with the best of intentions, to play into the hands of the 
opponents of change. The ideal literally grows out of experi- 
ence itself; and not out of experience in general, but of par- 
ticular experiential situations where alone it gets specific 
content, and where its relevancy is open to test. As against 
that conception of the practical judgment for which the par- 
ticular case is only a misrepresentation of the totality of truth, 
and the concrete act of thinking a logical irrelevance, this has 
much to say for itself. But it has no force against a common- 
sense realism and personalism which entertains no prejudice 
against change. Dewey himself came to pragmatism by way 
of English Hegelianism, and he inherited its lack of concern 
for the connection of knowledge with a human knower; and 
accordingly in repudiating the intellectualism of the idealists, 
it apparently did not occur to him to reconsider their attitude 
here as well. Instead, his absorption in the process of "think- 
ing" strengthens his antipathy to the problem of epistemology 
as a human reference of thought to reality as such; the rela- 
tion of thought to reality by definition turns for him into a 
quite different relation — that of thinking to a particular situ- 
ation. 

Nevertheless the fact remains that there at least is nothing 
in the motive of liberalism to justify this antipathy. A com- 
mon-sense dualism of thoughts and things has no need to deny 
that ideals are constructed by thinking rather than given ready- 
made, or that the ultimate purpose of thinldng lies in its relation 
to values. Its own special problem does not compete with this 
at all. Why should not ideals be realized, as they seem to be, 
by human individuals within a world of determinate, yet more 
or less plastic reality? or why should the recognition of this be 
incompatible with a constant growth in the ends to the realizing 
of which a knowledge of the conditions of attainment is ulti- 



John Dewey 393, 

n.ately to be put? This recognition does not tell us anything 
in detail about the process of thinking, any more than about 
the logical content of the ideas through which reality is de- 
scribed. It is a presupposition which tacitly underlies these 
— the presupposition that our thinking and our thoughts are 
concerned with independent reals, and are not mere psychology, 
or mere logic. But because it is a different problem, it does 
not follow that it is an unimportant one in its place. Mean- 
while the present point is, that if an interest in plastic social 
ideals is to constitute our fundamental motive, there is in 
so far pragmatically no reason to set up pragmatism as a dis- 
tinctive metaphysics, in opposition to the realistic and dualistic 
beliefs of common sense. 

And indeed there is a pragmatic reason against it, since it 
leads inevitably to argumentative subtleties that detract so 
much from the force of the practical appeal to general belief. 
For it cannot be denied that in the interest of making all judg- 
ments practical, and all objects of knowledge ideals, Dewey has 
created a highly speculative philosophy, whose practical value 
seems at best only the negative one of clearing away supposed 
mental obstacles to change and reconstruction; and since its 
own metaphysical peculiarities are far more obscure and doubt- 
provoking than the practical attitude for which they are in- 
tended to supply a foundation, they are liable to weaken, rather 
than increase, the possible influence for good which philosophy 
may exert. It is not obvious how the turning of philosophy 
from the work of interpreting reality — a fluid reality, it may 
well turn out to be — into a "method" merely, has supplied us 
with any practical tool for the rectif5dng of specific social ills 
— the task to which it appears that philosophy is for the future 
to confine itself; Dewey's analysis is perfectly general, and 
leaves concrete questions, as before, to the familiar methods 
of common sense and good judgment, enlightened by expert 
knowledge. One may be justified in centering his own atten- 
tion upon the logic of conduct, or of ethics. But he is going 



394 English and American Philosophy 

out of his way to make unnecessary trouble when he insists 
that the ethical problem is for man the only legitimate one, 
and that it supplants the need for paying any attention to 
questions about the nature of the real world in which the ethical 
situation arises, or about the way in which we are able to 
know this world. Ethical edification, no more than religious 
edification, can safely precede an impartial scrutiny of fact. 

4. What then, more precisely, is the nature of Dewey's 
pragmatism, considered as a distinctive philosophy, and what 
are the reasons for questioning its claims? We may start by 
putting ourselves at the point of view of an outside observer, 
in the presence of a fact of conduct. There is here a per- 
fectly objective situation, focussing in a human organism that 
reacts to express its various needs and impulses. In such 
an organism there are some reactions which are habitual or 
automatic, while others, again, we should characterize as in- 
telligent; and these last we should probably on examination 
connect in some fashion with a capacity for making adjust- 
ments to novel features in the situation, adjustments not pro- 
vided for by familiar ways of response. Accordingly the locus 
of intelligence may plausibly be looked for in connection with 
the process whereby, in terms of a future and as yet unrealized 
end, organic habits are reconstructed to meet conditions which 
otherwise would bring the life activity to a halt. 

So far we have been taking over without question the plain 
man^s assurance of the familiar facts he finds about him; we 
have viewed the matter from the standpoint of an observer, 
assumed to be competent to know what is going on in the world. 
All that such an observer can behold is behavior, in a definite 
and literal sense — bodies changing their spatial position in cer- 
tain discoverable ways with reference to other bodies; no 
question has so far arisen of any kind of fact other than the 
physical, which includes of course a physical nervous system 
inside the surface of the body. For many purposes this is a 
defensible attitude. Science certainly has the undoubted right 



John Dewey 395 

to assume without question that there are things to be ex- 
amined, and that these things are capable of being known. 
But philosophy can hardly afford to be equally complaisant. 
Two features in particular complicate the situation for the phi- 
losopher. When the scientist examines physical behavior he 
does not, or he need not, commit himself to any opinion about 
other things that claim also to be real. But a philosopher is 
concerned with the whole of reality. He cannot therefore take 
behavior as his sole field of inquiry, without dogmatically ex- 
cluding as illusions the other things that people have called 
non-physical; and this will need something more than a phi- 
losopher's assertion to make it stick. Further, the scientist 
has a right to forget, when he is dealing with his objects, that 
there is an outside observer — the scientist himself — ^by whom 
the world of objects is known; this, as a constant factor in the 
situation, is of interest to him only as it appears to be intro- 
ducing perturbations into his methods of observation. Never- 
theless the observer and his knowledge are actually a part of 
the total world; and for the philosopher, who deals with the 
situation as a whole, it may become important to inquire what 
this possibility of knowing implies. Knowledge that con- 
fessedly is for an observer, and so to this extent other than the 
objects of knowledge, carmot afford too hastily to shake itself 
free from the epistemological problem. 

In so far, then, as Dewey presupposes this first account of 
the matter, he is able to forego for philosophy a preliminary 
theory of reality only by assuming dogmatically a certain 
character as belonging to reality to start with, and refusing to 
submit it to argument. It may however be asked to what ex- 
tent he really does take such a starting point; and to this the 
answer will have to be more or less hesitating. There seems 
no reason to doubt that his words sometimes bear precisely 
this construction. The subject of experience is identified with 
an animal organism, whose brain is expressly called an organ 
of a certain kind of behavior, not of knowing the world. Ex- 



396 English and American Philosophy 

perience is defined as just certain modes of the interaction of 
natural objects, of which the physical body happens to be one; 
it is a matter of sensori-motor coordinations, of functions and 
habits, of active adjustments and readjustments, of coordina- 
tions and activities rather than of states of consciousness. Sub- 
jective and private things are merely events in the nervous 
system; operations of knowing are natural responses of the 
organism; intellectual analysis is ultimately physical and 
active; inference is a particular form of behaving to a given 
situation.^ On the other hand, this is not the only account 
of the matter which he gives. And because it is not the only 
account, it becomes particularly important to determine whether 
the two rival descriptions are essentially, or only verbally dis- 
crepant, since unless we are dealing with a doctrine that is un- 
ambiguous, we can never be certain of our ground. There 
is reason for believing that Dewey's doctrine is not unambigu- 
ous, and that the discrepancy is sometimes made use of for 
evading difficulties. 

5. To justify this claim, it will be useful first to restate the 
account of experience in a way to bring out more clearly its 
peculiarities, in their opposition now to common-sense belief. 
For our ordinary prejudices, nature is one thing, man's inner 
life of conscious experiencing another; and it is precisely the 
purpose of knowing, as one aspect of the conscious life, to 
overcome ideally the separation, so that natural difficulties in 
the way of satisfying action may be anticipated and provided 
for. Dewey however, in refusing to attach experience to an in- 
dividual, rejects this dualistic interpretation of the physical and 
the psychical; and accordingly he is compelled to retranslate 
the situation into terms that fall in rather less naturally with 
our familiar modes of expression. The sole reality is now a 
group of "things," perfectly physical and objective, conceived 

^Creative Intelligence, pp. 36, 37; Influence of Darwin, pp. 155, 157, 
Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 91 ; Essays in Experimental Logic, pp. 

228, 332, 425. 



John Dewey 397 

as belonging to -a "situation" that calls for reconstruction. 
Knowledge is not "our" knowledge of things; in the knowledge 
process, the very things themselves which are present in a non- 
cognitive and non-psychical way in perception, undergo change, 
and become psychical. They do this by serving as signs of fu- 
ture possibilities of experience, clues to the sort of action needed 
to carry life forward; a "thing" acting as a clue is all that we 
mean by the psychical. The whole process is thus a continuous 
transformation of reality, in which we literally make the idea 
true by modifying it — or the thing — till it is successful in meet- 
ing our needs. "Our" needs, it is natural to say again; though 
in strictness, the needs of the "situation" would be more exact. 
For experience here is not, once more, the experience of an 
individual, of you or me. Experience as such does not belong 
to individuals, but individuals belong to experience; a self, 
that is, like everything else, is what it is experienced as, and 
consequently there is no self until the recognition of a self arises 
— under definable conditions — in the experience process. 

6. Now to what extent does this new reading of the situa- 
tion in which knowledge plays a part, coincide with reality 
regarded from the standpoint of the scientific observer as a 
biological fact? It seems evident at once that the two can 
be made to agree, if at all, only by a forced interpretation. In 
each, to be sure, we succeed verbally in keeping within the 
limits of a "natural" process in terms of "things"; but while 
the first formulation does this in a perfectly imambiguous and 
familiar way, the second introduces large complications. What 
the observer sees is a series of physical changes which in the 
nervous system — in a manner not yet fully understood, but 
supposedly with no break in continuity — effects a harmony 
of the organism and its activities with the environment. But 
these nervous processes are not in any natural sense the "things" 
of the common world, taking on new and mental functions. 
External energies indeed cooperate with organic energies in 
producing neural effects that involve a transformation of their 



398 English and American Philosophy 

causes. But there is nothing whatever in this to suggest to 
the scientist Dewey's description of "experience"; the whole 
account in terms of experienced content, except as the scientist's 
own perceptual experience is involved, is for him mythological. 

And equally on the side of the "situation" out of which know- 
ing experiences arise, Dewey's new description quite fails to 
fit the scientific account of a physical universe in which organ- 
isms originate, and to which they react. The world of "experi- 
ence" is a very different world from this. It is vaguely 
bounded, confined within comparatively narrow limits, incom- 
plete in detail, represented equally in the most precise experi- 
ence of the scientist, and in the befogged and confused world 
of him who rises quickly from sleep in a pitch-dark room; 
"this vagueness, this doubtfulness, this confusion, is the thing 
experienced, and, qua real, is as 'good' a reality as the self- 
luminous vision of an Absolute." "Another trait of every res 
is that it has focus and context: brilliancy and obscurity, 
conspicuousness or apparency, and concealment' or reserve, 
with a constant movement of redistribution." ^ All this is ir- 
relevant to the world of science; to the observer of organic 
action, every physical process involved is on a level as regards 
definiteness with every other, and the focus — a term evi- 
dently taken over from James' account of the "psychological" 
stream — is at best only a very misleading figure of speech. 

It is not until we discard scientific biology altogether, that 
Dewey's second and most distinctive account of the situation 
begins to take on meaning. When I turn back and scrutinize 
a past experience of my own in terms simply of what it was 
experienced as from within, then indeed I find something that 
is very skilfully described in Dewey's analysis. I first catch 
myself, we will say, engaged in action, denuded so far as pos- 
sible of introspective interest, or of the need for reconstructive 
thought; this I can describe as a sense of enjoyable activity, 
going on in what is a part of the experience that I should 

'■Influence of Darwin, p. 236; Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 6. 



John Dewey 399 

recognize as a world of things and persons. These "things," 
however, are no longer the enduring and scientifically charac- 
terized physical objects of the external observer's world. Only 
a few of the characters that really belong to them in this latter 
world are at the moment present in experience; they come and 
go with the needs of my particular interest; they have con- 
tinually shifting outlines that shade off into a dim and confused 
background; in short they are, as we naturally tend to say, 
not things in their own existence, but things as I experience or 
take cognizance of them in some limited human situation. Sup- 
pose now I meet an obstacle. The same things that previously 
I was perceiving and reacting to automatically, I now subject 
to closer intellectual scrutiny and analysis; they may intelli- 
gibly be said, as experiences, to turn from perceptual objects 
into objects of thought. But such an abstract and concep- 
tualizing thought, again, still leaves the observer's objects un- 
changed; these do not lose any of their qualities, or gain any; 
because of the shifting play of my intellectual attention under 
the stress of particular needs. 

7. 'Just here is the crucial point which will determine 
whether or not one is to be able to call himself a pragmatist 
in Dewey's sense. Everything that has just been said conveys 
the implication that I can call this situation "experience" 
simply because it is my experience — because the situation 
focusses about my interests and my organism, and objects play 
their part as ministering to these. True, it does not lend 
itself to description merely .in subjective terms. But because 
in experience there is inherent the cognitive recognition of a 
real world, we have no right to assume that reality itself is 
reducible just to immediately experienced content. Logically, 
Dewey's whole position rests on the dictum that perceptions 
are not cases of knowledge; and this itself is not proven by ex- 
perience. We seem in perception, on the contrary, to find our- 
selves in contact with what transcends any immediately ex- 
perienced fact. And in the end the sole reason offered for re- 



400 English and American Philosophy 

fusing to accept this claim, is that knowledge cannot have 
an experience-transcending function because knowing is noth- 
ing but thinking, inquiring, solving problems. Dewey defines 
knowledge as thinking, and thinking in terms of practical ends ; 
and then when some aspect of human belief fails to fit this 
definition, the belief, and not the definition, is tacitly assumed 
to be at fault. The only way to meet this is, accordingly, to 
reverse the method, and to insist that definitions should be 
broad enough to cover our natural interpretation of the facts. 

8. The first and least disputable charge, from such a stand- 
point, to be brought against the identification of reality with 
experience, is that in any case it leaves no meaning to our 
natural conviction that a real universe exists anterior to or- 
ganic life, out of which organisms have themselves evolved. 
Dewey expressly defines experience as the intercourse of a 
living being with the physical and social environment; wher- 
ever there is experience, — and so wherever there is reality, — 
there must be a living organism.^ This means, if it means 
anything, that reality has no content for us except in terms of 
the activities of organisms. For science, however, the organic 
situation is plainly not reality, but only one particular form 
that reality may assume; there is no reason at all apparent for 
reducing the cosmos to the necessity, if it is to maintain its 
status, of cooperating in some human act. Even for biology, 
the central role of organic action is due not to anything in the 
nature of reality, but simply to a selective interest in a special 
problem; this activity becomes a point from which all reality 
may be said to radiate only when we shift our standing, and 
take, instead, the position of an inner witness, an active agent, 
or doer, or experiencer, interested not in impersonal and scien- 
tific observation, but in "living." 

And when we make this shift, it becomes much less easy to 
meet the objection that "experience" is being taken no longer 
as reality, in any commonly accepted sense, but as some par- 

^ Creative Intelligence, p. 8 ; Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 7. 



John Dewey 401 

ticular person's experience — a psychological and, when it is 
properly defined, "subjective" fact. These "things" which 
enter into experience are my perceptions and thoughts of things, 
utilized for the limited purposes of an individual organism; 
and such knowledge does not cease to be my knowing be- 
cause the situation which I recognize is an objective one. 
Dewey's reason for denying the identification of experience 
with my experience, — that, namely, the self is a form of ex- 
perience, and not experience a possession of the self, — holds 
only when the point at issue is already prejudged. // reality 
means only what it is experienced as, and ij knowledge has no 
dimension except as a process of inquiry, then the "self" must 
come into being only with the explicit experience or recog- 
nition of a self. But the whole claim breaks down in the 
face of the pragmatist's own assumption of a "situation" which 
is larger than the thinking process itself. The fact plainly is, 
that if we presuppose a state of affairs within which thinking 
or knowledge enters as a subordinate stage, this non-cognitional 
situation, if it is to be talked about at all, must be known by 
someone as existing in its own right, and not merely as a case 
of knowing, which by definition it is not; and then there must 
be propositions true about it which are not a part of what 
it was experienced as. To hold that the object perceived 
or acted on passes wholly into the object as known, this last 
being a subsequent and altered form of it, and that there is 
no transcendent reference back to the non-cognitional experi- 
ence, is for the original "thing" simply to disappear from the 
universe of reflective discourse, save for a non-natural philos- 
opher standing outside the world and contemplating it, freed 
from the limitations which the definition of knowledge imposes. 
A fearsome noise — a purely non-cognitive reality — changes, 
we are told, into a harmless and familiar one under the in- 
fluence of cognitive analysis; but how then do we "know" what 
it was before it changed, so as to contrast it with its altered 
appearance as known? 



402 English and American Philosophy 

Once more we find the difficulty met only by the process 
of arbitrary definition. A past fact, at least, the critic urges, 
must be known in its own right as a fact not now present; 
and so in this case knowledge is not merely a process of think- 
ing going on, but points back to a reality whose existence 
lies beyond the knowing experience. No, Dewey replies, you 
are confusing the content of the judgment with the reference 
of that content; the content of my idea about yesterday's 
rain certainly involves past time, but the distinctive or 
characteristic aim of judgment is none the less to give this 
content a future reference.^ But there are two forms of refer- 
ence in the situation, in addition to the logical content of 
knowledge for which pastness is indeed not something in the 
past, but only an abstract and timeless essence; and to as- 
sume that the practical reference to future use is the "distinc- 
tive" form, which justifies us in ignoring the contemplative 
or cognitive reference to an actual past, is simply a refusal 
to face the particular difficulty charged. 

And now to turn back to the special point in question, ij 
it may be regarded as a possibility that an identical piece of 
experience can be reflected on in some subsequent thought, and 
truths about it discovered that were not realized when the 
experience took place, there is nothing to prevent its having be- 
longed to the limited circle of "my" life, even though it was 
not at the time recognized as mine. And that this is actually 
so of the sort of experience to which Dewey's description ap- 
plies, seems at any rate too natural an interpretation to be 
simply brushed aside. Nor does the insistence that the ex- 
perience is always "social" alter the case in the slightest 
degree. It is true that in my activities I recognize real per- 
sons, as I recognize real things; they enter into the experienced 
situation, and are essential to its significance. But that which 
makes it describable as a "single" situation is the way in which 
it grows out of the activities of one particular organism. The 
^ Injiiience of Darwin, p. i6i. 



John Dewey 403 

reactions of other organisms belong merely to the cognitive 
content, psychologically, of the reconstructing process, — or, in 
biological terms, to the environment, — and do not constitute 
the process as a specific activity; this last will always be 
found translating itself into an individual, and not a composite 
affair. 

9. The point of the preceding criticism is, then, not that 
Dewey's account of knowledge is an inaccurate account of the 
fact as he defines it, but that his definition rules out other 
aspects that are essential to any full description of the real 
world. In the end his sole justification for this lies in the 
arbitrary selection of a problem, and the will to see things 
only in the light of this. It may very well be true that ethical 
inquiry can be conducted without its being necessary first to 
become an epistemologist ; but it does not follow that no one 
has a right to interest himself in a different field, where episte- 
mology may still be a matter of legitimate concern. Mean- 
while when we once recognize that we are electing to deal 
only with the matter of ends, or of ideals, Dewey's practical 
contentions can be considered on their own merits, as the at- 
tempt to supply a method for a naturalistic conception of 
progress which avoids the pitfalls alike of utopianism, and of a 
mechanistic materialism. That ideals are not something to 
which to flee for spiritual refuge, but militant weapons of re- 
form; that they do not preexist in a higher world, but are con- 
tinuous with natural events whose possibilities they express; that 
they are not ready-made standards, but the creation of active in- 
telligence, formed in the process of dealing with specific situ- 
ations; that life does not get its value from remote cosmic rea- 
son, but evolves its own values ; that good is not abstract and 
absolute, but plural and concrete; and that not perfection, but 
the ever-widening process of perfecting, constitutes the final 
goal, — all this is a distinctive point of view which, whether 
fully defensible or not, is at least straightforward and un- 
ambiguous. 



404 English and American Philosophy 

10. Nevertheless even here the metaphysical denial of 
epistemology, and the determination to remove from knowl- 
edge any conscious act of reference to reality beyond as a 
part of the very meaning that experience carries within itself, 
weakens to an extent the verisimilitude of the ethical analy- 
sis. In reducing values to valumg' — the significance which 
objects come to take on for a given situation in the process 
of finding its appropriate solution, — all values become instru- 
mental values, or means to an end rather than the end itself. 
Ends, Dewey urges, are not values, nor do we argue about 
them. Ends are given to us, forced upon us by the life 
process; and it is not until some end is already present, in 
the form of a definite problem clamoring to be solved, that 
valuing, and with it values, comes into existence. Take for 
example the illustration of purchasing a suit of clothes. The 
various aspects of price, style, quality and the like, which enter 
into my choice, represent no standardized values; the weight 
to be assigned to each emerges as the process of valuation 
proceeds. Meanwhile the suit-buying itself is presupposed 
before a problem can arise; and if we ask why the end is 
chosen, the only answer is. Because we cannot help it, be- 
cause the state of affairs demands it.^ 

Nevertheless the verbal situation here is not altogether a 
comfortable one. It does strike us as a little strange to say 
that we never deliberate about ends, but only about means; 
at least we make a natural distinction between elements which 
enter into and make up the satisfying nature of what we want, 
and those which are merely a means to its attainment, as 
signing a check is the means to the securing of our suit of 
clothes. And the difficulty seems to go back, again, to the 
refusal to recognize that knowledge is anything more than 
problem-solving, or that we can be said to know in the sense 
of a reflective or contemplative reference to an object. The 
difficulty may take either of two forms. If we accept literally 
^Essays in Experimental Logic, Ch. 14. 



John Dewey 405 

the biological side of Dewey's teaching, the whole conception 
of value, to begin with, except in the sense in which the 
wheels and cogs of a machine have value, seems to slip from 
our grasp. On strictly behavioristic terms, the end to which 
the valuation process looks is simply the physical adjustment 
of forward-moving action. Whether Dewey himself recognizes 
more than this, is not easy to determine with certainty from 
his language. He does indeed allow that as a factor in ac- 
tivity — as distinct from "knowing," — a thing has value in the 
sense that we love it, prize it, cling to it; but do the former 
terms here mean anything in addition to the last one? In 
so far as experience is interpreted as biological activity, — and 
at some point in his descriptions of the fact, there is always 
a form of expression to suggest this, — prizing can be nothing 
more than "acting to perpetuate the object's presence." And 
so far no value is provided for in terms of what we call a 
sense of value. It is only an atavistic return to subjective 
categories which prevents us from recognizing that "satisfac- 
tion" has in such a case no more meaning for an organism 
than for a printing press. Satisfaction in the proper sense 
is a kind of inner experience not open to the scientific observer; 
it is suffused with feeling and not a mere form of movement, 
a state of felt enjoyment in acting and not a bare physical 
act. 

Now this is the sort of end that we naturally say has "in- 
trinsic" value — an end which is appealing in itself, and not 
simply useful as a means. And having enjoyed such satisfying 
experiences, we surely seem to be able to hold them contem- 
platively before the mind, and recognize their quality of de- 
sirableness, or their "value." There is no need to retract the 
concession that in the concrete, the value which constitutes a 
specific human aim is created in the process of evaluing; past 
values are instrumental in a sense, in that in contributing to 
the new act they may need to be revalued. Nevertheless they 
are instruments of a special sort; and unless we could thus 



4o6 English and American Philosophy 

envisage ends as desirable and valuable in themselves, we 
should be badly handicapped in settling on a new course of 
action. When we consult a physician it is true that, in terms 
of the immediate problem before us, the restoration of health, 
not health itself, is the end we seek. But unless health inde- 
pendently were recognized by us as a good, why should we 
want to restore it? — there is no purely biological force that 
drives sick men to a doctor. We act, Dewey has told us, not 
because the end has value, but because we have to act, because 
life is bound to go on. Now, irrespective of the fact that there 
might be occasions when the process of evaluation would call 
for death rather than for further living, the objection that will 
naturally be felt to this is, that it appears to make life auto- 
matic, and our ends the outcome of the situation wholly, rather 
than of a reflective sense of what kind of activity is for us 
worth while. But our choice is not limited to the assigning of 
value to elements within a special and fated kind of act. Life 
indeed forces on us the need that we do something, since re- 
fraining from action, even, is an act; but this is far too vague 
and indeterminate to mean anything in terms of concrete prob- 
lems. Between any particular kind of end and others, we 
always have a choice; and to make this choice, we find our- 
selves perforce adopting the contemplative attitude of en- 
visaging tentative ends or values — values in the large, em- 
bodied in terms of specific past experiences of satisfaction, — 
which is presupposed by, rather than reducible to, the activity 
of fresh evaluing, and which is entirely comparable with that 
transcendent reference in other and less directly practical judg- 
ments which Dewey's whole theory ignores. 

§ 4. Other Pragmatists. Pearson. Baldwin 

I. In view of its short period of existence, the literature of 
pragmatism, most of it highly controversial, has been volu- 
minous, especially in the pages of the various philosophical 



Other Pragmatists 407 

journals. Among the pragmatists A. W. Moore, — ^whose Prag- 
nmtism and Its Critics is the clearest popular exposition of 
the creed, — H. Heath Bawden, and, in the field of the phi- 
losophy of religion, E. S. Ames, are representatives of the so- 
called Chicago School, which owes its existence to Dewey's 
teaching; John Russell and H. M. Kallen are influenced more 
directly by James; while Schiller finds a disciple in D. A. Mur- 
ray. Russell, originally a vigorous critic of pragmatism, is 
notable as affording proof that philosophers are occasionally 
open to conviction by argument. An early manifesto of the 
Chicago group is the volume of Studies in Logical Theory by 
Dewey and a number of his pupils, published in 1906; while 
more recently another cooperative book called Creative Intelli- 
gence has appeared, to which nine philosophers contribute. 
Coinciding in a general way with the pragmatic tendency in 
some of its larger features, is the reproduction of Bergson's 
philosophy in a literature, largely expository however, which 
has already attained considerable proportions; H. Wildon Carr's 
is the most prominent name in this connection. A pragmatic 
motive is also apparent in certain individual thinkers who do 
not so readily submit to classification. Henry Sturt has al- 
ready been mentioned in connection with personal idealism. 
In Edward D. Fawcett, the romantic impulse conspicuous in 
James and Schiller is still more pronounced. Fawcett con- 
ceives of nature as the product of an ever-changing cosmic 
Imagination, a game which the Imagination plays with itself. 
He has in common with pragmatism its acceptance of the 
reality of change and time, of novelty and spontaneity un- 
checked by fixed or preordained directions of creation, and of 
the subordinate place of the conceptual framework of science 
— a secondary product that has no reality outside its human 
creators' heads, and that serves merely as a practical tool — 
in comparison with the rich and unstinted variety of the im- 
aginal world, with its concrete and vivid sensuous qualities. 
2. It is here also that one may most naturally refer to 



4o8 English and American Philosophy 

two other contemporaneous writers, one primarily a naturalist, 
and the other a psychologist. Karl Pearson is the most 
thoroughgoing English representative of the ideal of scientific 
method which is taken over by most of the pragmatists, and 
which looks upon scientific concepts as a logical shorthand for 
summarizing and ordering the facts of immediate sensational 
experience. In the very statement of his thesis, however, Pear- 
son adds a supplementary claim which complicates it. These 
concepts, it appears, are not mere intellectual formulae, but 
play an active part in life as well; they intervene in the evolu- 
tionary process, and help us to fit conduct to sense impressions 
more skilfully and quickly. But in thus locating science itself 
in a larger situation, and taking thought as a means of or- 
ganic adjustment in the struggle for existence, we have passed 
beyond a mere description of sensations to an attempt at causal 
explanation, which rests upon that very notion of a world of 
reality, outside the flux of feeling, of which Pearson's sensa- 
tionalism supposes itself to have gotten rid. It is true a way 
is found of withdrawing the concession; but it is at the cost 
of increasing the improbabilities involved. To escape attribut- 
ing the laws which resume the routine of phenomena to any- 
thing beyond the conscious content itself, the suggestion is 
made that this routine may perhaps be due, not to the en- 
vironment, but to the organized conscious subject, which 
creates order by its selective activity in picking out data from 
what is in itself a universal chaos.^ But the whole concep- 
tion of survival loses its point if there is no determinate reality 
to which we need to adjust ourselves, corresponding to the 
routine which science formulates. Doubtless the particular 
form of description is a human achievement. But if the achieve- 
ment is to get us anywhere, it must have an explanatory value 
also with reference to a world on whose sequences man's sur- 
vival depends; evolution and natural selection, at the least, 
are natural causes which are required to lend to conceptual 
^Grammar of Science, Ch. 3, Sec. 12. 



Karl Pearson 409 

shorthand a practical utility, and not mere conceptual short- 
hand themselves. 

The same resort to what his principles leave meaningless is 
apparent in Pearson's whole treatment of the physical world 
as a complex of sensations. This everywhere presupposes a 
real nervous system, picking up messages from a surrounding 
reservoir of forces realistically conceived, however mysterious 
they may be in their nature. Pearson's favorite metaphor is 
that of a great telephone exchange, which is present to the 
operator only in terms of the sounds that occur at his re- 
ceiving instrument. But if the entire world of the operator 
is limited to these sounds, the exchange — which gives all its 
point to the illustration — is at once dissipated into thin air; 
the explanation presupposes that we know a reach of fact of 
which its outcome is to show that nothing can possibly be 
known, not even so much as to give us ground for imagining 
it to exist. The lack of rigor in Pearson's logic may be il- 
lustrated by his suggestion that we gain the right to abandon 
solipsism, and to accept the existence of other and independent 
selves, through recognizing the chance that science may con- 
ceivably some day, by arranging proper (physical)- connec- 
tions between my (physical) brain and that of my neighbor, 
bring his sensations actually within the circle of my experience.^ 

3. In James Mark Baldwin, many of the more strictly 
psychological features of pragmatism — its emphasis on the 
genetic method, on the active and selective character of human 
thinking, on the instrumental relationship of thought to wider 
human ends — are defended in much the fashion of James 
and Schiller. But Baldwin stops short of a pragmatic meta- 
physics, and accepts expressly the control of thought by reality 
which it has to recognize if it is to think truly. Accordingly 
a place is left for neutral and objective tnith, as a system of 
commonly observable relationships freed from direct depend- 
ence on a preferential human interest and interpretation, even 
^Ibid., Ch. II, Sec. s. 



410 English and American Philosophy 

though it be true that knowledge grows originally out of special 
interests, and that the knowledge system has its justification 
in the further ends which it may be made to serve. Baldwin's 
own metaphysics, for which he invents the title of Pancalism, 
finds in the aesthetic experience the clue to the true nature of 
reality. All other interpretative concepts fail, in that they 
lend themselves to dualisms which they cannot overcome. Thus 
knowledge and teleological value, the true and the good, can 
never be translated fully into terms one of the other. Even 
the religious conception fails to achieve unity; as ideal, God 
is a postulate beyond the grasp of intellectual apprehension, 
while in so far as he is actual he is not ideal, but remains a 
finite person along with other persons. It is only in achiev- 
ing and enjoying the beautiful that we fully realize the real, 
and are released from the bondage of urgent and divided 
motives; in beauty, the dualisms of the mental life — of theo- 
retical and practical, mind and body, inner and outer, freedom 
and necessity, the actual and the ideal — merge in an immedi- 
ate contemplative value of real presence. Feeling, rather than 
reason or will, is thus the ultimate organ of reality. 



CHAPTER VIII 
NEO-REALISM 

§ I. English Neo-Realism. G. E. Moore 

I. The realism of the latter part of the nineteenth and 
the opening of the twentieth century was on the whole too 
sporadic, and too little marked by sensational features, to at- 
tract any very large amount of attention either from the domi- 
nant idealism, or from its younger rival pragmatism. In more 
recent years, however, realism has suddenly developed into an 
aggressive school, characterized by an intense class conscious- 
ness, and a lively faith in its own destiny. Traces at least of 
all of its distinctive doctrines can be found in the past; but 
these doctrines are given an explicit logical setting which 
justifies its claim to rank as a genuine philosophical novelty. 
Here also the task of evaluating the movement is compli- 
cated, however, as in the case of pragmatism, by the fact that 
it combines several motives whose relation to one another is 
not at once obvious; and indeed in the end it is open to ques- 
tion whether we have to do with a single tendency, or with 
several rival ones. 

Neo-realism and pragmatism meet on common ground in 
their hostility to two foes — absolutism on the one hand, and 
representative dualism on the other. To both of these neo- 
realism opposes the thesis, that we have an immediate knowl- 
edge of reality that is non-mental in its nature; though such 
a doctrine bears a different emphasis according to the con- 
text. As against idealism, it insists that things are not in 

411 



412 English and American Philosophy 

any sense dependent upon consciousness for their existence or 
their nature, but pass in and out of the knowledge relation- 
ship unchanged. As against dualism, it denies the interposition 
of any sensation, or idea, or mental state, to mediate our ac- 
quaintance with the independent fact, and maintains that the 
object is present in knowledge identically and in person. This 
theory of sense perception takes indeed two very different 
forms. In the one of them it still leaves the "mental" standing 
over against the physical, but reduces the mental from a "state 
of consciousness" to a mental act; in its more radical develop- 
ment, consciousness and mind are eliminated altogether as en- 
tities, and become merely relationships of a special sort into 
which physical objects may enter among themselves. But on 
the fundamental issue neo-realists are all agreed. 

2. To justify this conception of the independence of the 
object of knowledge and its consequent non-mental character, 
various considerations are adduced; but there is one in par- 
ticular which is of special significance, and which brings us 
into contact with the second important aspect of neo-realistic 
doctrine — the logical one. This argument rests upon the so- 
called "externality of relations." If, as the neo-realist contends 
in opposition to the idealist, terms may stand in relation without 
being modified by the relationship, it is open to suppose that of 
the knowledge relation this also is the case; and we are ac- 
cordingly in a position to allow full weight to the empirical 
evidence in favor of such an epistemological realism. Mean- 
while apart also from this special consequence for the knowl- 
edge problem, the theory of external relations has other and 
more general bearings on the metaphysics of neo-realism. Thus 
it gives, as against the idealistic standard of a single organized 
system, the possibility that the elements of reality may be 
known truly by themselves, and so vindicates analysis as the 
true philosophical method, in opposition to the belief among 
idealists that, in breaking up relational complexes, analysis 
alters also the character of their components. Still more sig- 



Neo-Realism 413 

nificant is a further ontological conclusion. If relations are 
as genuinely real as the things which they relate, if they are 
not additions of the thinking mind, but are discovered by 
the mind as truly as sense data are discovered, it is necessary 
to iind in the non-mental world a place for entities not in any 
obvious sense physical. The outcome is a revival of Platonic 
realism. Since universals are there to be discovered, and have 
reality independently of being known, there must be a realm 
of being to which they eternally belong; and if we apply the 
term existence to entities that are located at some particular 
time or place, we may call this realm the realm of subsistence, 
and say, with Plato, that apart from the world revealed through 
the senses, there is another and subsisting world laid up in the 
heavens, and inhabited by such things as logical principles, 
ethical ideals, mathematical relations. Beauty, and Truth, and 
all the eternal verities. 

3. The starting point of English neo-realism is probably to 
be looked for in two articles by George E. Moore which ap- 
peared in the philosophical journal Mind about the opening 
of the new century, one of them dealing with the psychological 
theory of perception, while the other involves the logical motive 
that constitutes the second main direction of the neo-realistic 
interest. Here both the theses receive a concise expression 
that makes them relatively more easy to examine; and it will 
accordingly be convenient to take them as the text for certain 
general comments that are intended to apply to t^eir appear- 
ance in other contexts also. 

Moore's published volumes belong to the field of ethics, 
where his neo-realism takes the form of a contention that 
''goodness" is an ultimate and objectively subsisting entity 
which cannot be further analyzed, but can only be perceived. 
This same contention is applied to "truth" in the earliei* of 
the two articles referred to; ^ truth, like goodness, is an ob- 
jective character, also unanalyzable, which belongs to certain 
* The Nature of Judgment, Mind, N. S. Vol. 8, p. 176. 



414 English and American Philosophy 

judgments. Such a conclusion is the natural, if not the neces- 
sary consequence of the peculiar neo-realistic attitude toward 
knowledge. When the idealistic doctrine that truth is only de- 
finable in terms of a comprehensive unity of logical system is 
repudiated, and the truth character is attached to single pro- 
positions, two main possibilities present themselves. If the 
abstract thought content involved in knowledge is distin- 
guished from the object of knowledge, then it is open to define 
truth as a relation in which our thought stands to the object 
which it knows; but in case such a dualism also be rejected, 
and knowledge described as immediate presence to awareness 
or intuition, there is no obvious meaning to its claim to "truth," 
if not in terms of some internal property directly open to 
inspection. 

Moore attempts to show that such an issue is as a matter 
of fact logically presupposed in every possible proof or test 
of truth, and that this necessarily leads to a view of reality as 
conceptual in its nature. What in a judgment I mean to assert 
is nothing about my mental states, but always a specific con- 
nection of concepts, recognized as objectively valid, and not as 
mere ideas in my mind. Accordingly if truth and falsehood 
have their sole meaning as applied to a relation between con- 
cepts, it is impossible to subordinate concepts to existents, 
as if these last were something more ultimate, and supplied a 
standard by which the truth of conceptual knowledge is to 
be determined. Truth cannot depend on a relation to exist- 
ents, since the proposition by which it is so defined must itself 
be true; and the truth of this cannot be established, without 
a vicious circle, by exhibiting its dependence on an existent. 
An appeal to the "facts" is useless; for in order that a fact 
may be made the basis of an argument, it must be put in the 
form of a proposition, and this proposition already must be 
supposed true. It seems necessary, then, to hold that the 
fundamental basis of reality is the logical concept; existence 
itself is nothing but a special concept, and the existential judg- 



G. E. Moore 415 

ment, "man exists," means only that the concept man and the 
concept existence stand in a specific relation. All that exists 
is thus composed of concepts necessarily related to one another 
in definite ways, and likewise to the concept of existence; and 
a concept cannot itself be described either as an existent or as 
part of one, since in the conception of an existent it is already 
presupposed. So if a judgment is false, this is not because 
my ideas do not correspond to reality, but because such a con- 
junction of concepts is not to be found among existents. And 
the peculiar kind of conjunction which constitutes a proposition 
true cannot be further defined, but must be immediately recog- 
nized. 

In one form or another, the general point of view here sug- 
gested reappears constantly in neo-realistic metaphysics. In 
its final nature reality is logical essence — an affair of terms 
and propositions. It is significant that the same result has been 
found emerging in the rival philosophy of idealism. Neo- 
realism, to be sure, is for the most part pluralistic rather than 
monistic. It denies that we have any reason to suppose that 
these logical entities are necessarily grouped together in a 
single organic system; and in any case it asserts emphatically 
the self-subsistence of the logical fact, as against the demand for 
an underlying principle, or source, or universal self-conscious- 
ness, to bring unity about. But in both alike logic tends to 
become more ultimate than existence. And in both cases the 
difficulty of meeting the contention is the same; since we 
cannot think of anything whatever except in terms of concepts, 
or of universals, if we once allow ourselves to be tied down 
to a world of description, no logic can compel us to go beyond 
its boundaries. Philosophers, who are mainly interested in 
ideas, have always been under a strong temptation thus to 
force reality into a conceptual mold. 

4. The first thing to be said about this is, as before, that 
it clearly does not satisfy our normal sense of what "reality" 
means. Whatever existence in itself may be, it assuredly is 



4i6 English and American Philosophy 

something more than the concept of existence, whether this 
be regarded as a single logical entity, or as a complex of more 
ultimate entities. Meanwhile it is true, however, that the situ- 
ation is not at all a simple one; and there are aspects of it 
which may seem to give backing to the neo-realistic claim 
even in the eyes of common sense. This is most evident when 
we try to make clear to ourselves the nature of relations. We 
should unquestionably be inclined to admit that relations are 
in some sense real. When I perceive the difference of red 
and blue, I do not naturally suppose that my mind has added 
something to the colors in comparing them; they actually are 
different, and would still have been so had the difference never 
been noted. At the same time, we find it a little hard to give 
the relation quite the same standing that physical facts possess. 
Relations, accordingly, appear to have a peculiar status, which 
readily suggests the notion of a Platonic subsistence. 

On the other hand, however, common sense would probably 
refuse to go further, and attribute to subsistence a superior, 
or even a strictly independent status. We should ordinarily not 
be ready to assign being of any sort to "difference," were there 
not things already in existence to be different. Granting exist- 
ences, there is a strong compulsion to believe that a great 
variety of relationships really hold between them, or, as we 
may put it, subsist; but apart from these realities that them- 
selves are more than subsistents, the relationships simply 
would not be at all. It might be replied to this that while, 
indeed, terms must be supposed before we can have relations, 
these terms may themselves be universal terms, and so have 
no need to be thought of as existing. But this at least gives 
to the term subsistence an extension which diminishes very 
sensibly the initial persuasiveness of its metaphysical claims. 
While we do have a strong natural conviction of the reality, 
or subsistence, of relations between the elements of the actu- 
ally existing world, — including real ideas and real acts, — we 
cannot appeal to such a conviction in favor of the independent 



G. E. Moore 417 

being of concepts or universals — of whiteness that is not any- 
white in particular, and of man apart from individual men. 
On the contrary, most people would feel great difficulty, not 
merely in believing in, but in attachioig any definite meaning to 
the notion that whiteness has being of any sort when taken 
apart both from existing white things, and from existing ideas 
in the minds of human beings; especially since, by bringing 
in "ideas," we seem able to give a sense to all that legitimately 
can be said about the "subsistence" of whiteness. For if we as- 
sume, as we have an apparent right to do, that by thinking, 
and the use of ideas, we are able to refer to characteristics 
attaching to the actually existing world, to hold their abstract 
essence before the mind, and, by analysis and comparison of 
their content, to detect the same relationships that they contri- 
bute to the existences in which they are embodied, we should 
still be in a position to talk of conceptual facts as actual 
characters of the world, and not as merely subjective or mental, 
without being called upon to assign them to a mysterious realm 
of their own, and then having to meet the further problem of 
bringing such a realm into connection with particular facts 
of existence and of cognition. For on this showing concepts 
are always attached to something that exists, — in their origin, 
to the cases of existence from which they are collected, and in 
their abstract conceptual form, to knowing processes which also 
are existing facts, and to whose generalizing agency that logical 
function is due which renders concepts possible sources of 
inference. 

5. And now this alternative also suggests an answer to 
Moore's logical argument. What alone this seems to show is 
that we cannot demonstrate the truth of anything without pre- 
supposing true propositions; but that is not to define truth. And 
as a matter of fact the truth of a proposition, it may be claimed, 
does not really lie where Moore finds it. Propositions, to begin 
with, do not themselves subsist, though the relations which 
are set forth by them do ; a proposition c^ a proposition, if we 



41 8 English and American Philosophy 

follow the natural view, is simply a way in which a relational 
complex is translated into ideas, or terms of mind. And mean- 
while this relation which a proposition formulates is as such 
not true; it simply is. There is no more reason for calling 
the relation of equality between x and y true, than for calling 
the existence of a table true; both are facts simply, which 
become "truths" only as they are referred to by a mental belief 
that takes the form of a proposition. What in strictness the 
truth claim here involves is, that the proposition, as a mental 
apprehension, correctly corresponds to the relationship per- 
ceived; just as a qualitative character is "truthful," not as it 
exists in the thing it qualifies, but as its presence in a knowl- 
edge content is an accurate transcript of its non-cognitive 
status. Grant that truth is only the perception of a logical 
relationship, and it does apparently follow that knowledge is 
reducible to propositions illuminated internally by their own 
self-evidence; but on the assumption that what is thus re- 
vealed is a relation, not a truth, and that belief, whether true 
or false, involves, in addition to any possible apprehension of 
content, a reference to reality such as carries us beyond logic, 
and the reason for subordinating existence to concepts disap- 
pears. Moore's whole argument implies, again, that we have 
already defined tmth in such a way that the object of belief is 
identical with the logical terms through which it is described; 
and this is not a compulsory assumption. 

6. Meanwhile even apart from the soundness of this criti- 
cism, there is one problem or set of problems in particular 
confronting the neo-realist, on which no agreement seems to 
have been reached. This has to do with the connection in 
which the "data" which for neo-realism are the immediate ob- 
jects of knowledge stand to the physical things with which 
science deals, and, on the other hand, with the relation, among 
these data themselves, of the logical knowledge of universals 
to the particular data of sense. And this lends a considerable 
degree of uncertainty to the doctrine of sense data also, which 



G. E. Moore 419 

constitutes periiaps the leading motive in the development of the 
movement in England, and which gets expression in Moore's 
other article in Mind} If however we are satisfied not to press 
these further questions, up to a point the neo-realistic theory 
of sense perception is simple, and extremely ingenious; and 
if it is true, it is of a character to short-circuit a large number 
of the controversies most familiar in the philosophy of the past. 
English empiricism, to take a typical example, had been wont 
to assume, as indeed self-evident, that that with which we 
come into immediate contact in our lives is sensation, or feel- 
ing — a psychical or mental stuff; the "object," accordingly, 
if there be such a thing at all, is not given directly, but can 
only be inferred. This assumption Moore thinks is due to 
overlooking a distinction which, once recognized, throws a new 
light on the entire situation. What is the so-called psychical 
fact, or sensation? — as psychical, it is not mere redness, but 
awareness of red. There are, that is, two things involved in 
close relationship — the.sense datum, and the awareness. But 
with this distinction noted, it becomes at once a question what 
right we have to taik about the redness itself as subjective. 
The "awareness" is indeed subjective; but the awareness is 
not red. It is not as a red awareness, but as an awareness of 
red, that a sensation is describable; 'sensation, rn other words, 
is a compound of two facts, and in the second fact, or the 
"redness," we already are in contact with something just as 
objective as chairs or tables. We do not have, accordingly, 
to find a way of getting outside the mind from the subjective 
starting point of sensation ; in sensation, we are already beyond 
the subjective. 

Around this fundamental thesis that the mental is not a 
stuff, sensational or otherwise, but a diaphanous act which pro- 
ceeds directly to an objective content, a considerable literature 
has grown up during the last few years, which undertakes to 
reconstruct the philosophic situation in a way to correct ideal- 
^ The Refutation of Idealism, Mind, N. S., Vol. 12, p. 433. 



420 English and American Philosophy 

ism, while avoiding also the difficulties attendant on a dualism 
between ideas and things. The position has certain apparent 
advantages which account for the warm welcome it has re- 
ceived, and which make it obviously worth while to try it out 
as a serious h3Apothesis; Moore's attempt to lend it logical 
necessity, however, fails to be entirely convincing. In deny- 
ing that color, for example, is the content or quality of a sen- 
sation, and that there is any such verifiable entity as a "blue 
awareness," advantage is taken of an ambiguity in the latter 
word to which attention has had already to be called in previ- 
ous connections. It of course will have to be allowed that if 
we mean by awareness an act of knowing, a blue ''act" comes 
near to being an absurdity. Nevertheless the English mind, at 
any rate, has never been conscious of any particular difficulty 
in talking about a blue "feeling," where the blueness is in- 
tended actually to characterize the nature of the felt fact, just 
as painfulness characterizes the nature of another felt fact of 
a comparable sort. In other words, "consciousness," implicitly 
if not always with entire clearness, has been distinguished from 
"knowing," as an existence from an act — an existence consti- 
tuted just by the indefinable fact of "presence to feeling"; 
meanwhile this cannot exist of course apart from some specific 
form or nature, color quality being among the "natures" which 
thus can be existentially and immediately felt. The reality of 
such a feeling awareness, which is, though it does not in the 
distinctive sense "know" itself to be, each man will have to 
determine by appeal to his own experience; but the issue can- 
not be settled fairly by ignoring the possibility, and talking 
as if awareness, or consciousness, could only mean "knowledge 
of," to the exclusion of "feeling of." And if painful feeling, 
for example, be thus regarded as distinguishable from a "knowl- 
edge" of pain, and as capable of existing in the absence of 
such knowledge, then the separation on which Moore's realistic 
theory of sense perception is based would fall away, and we 



G. E. Moore 421 

should be left, as before, with a mental fact of existence other 
than the diaphanous mental act. 

And in denying the more traditional analysis, neo-realism 
has also, as has been pointed out, a number of further prob- 
lems of its own to face. What is the status of these "sense 
data" — to use the term most commonly adopted for indi- 
cating the absence of that mental character that "sensation" 
suggests? Are they to be identified with the physical object 
of science? or are they purely logical entities, like relations? 
or have they some standing midway between the two? Are 
they permanent and persisting, or intermittent, and dependent 
on the interaction of the organism with its physical surround- 
ings? Again, how are we to conceive the mental fact, the 
awareness or act of knowing? What is an awareness which 
seems to take its specific character from the independent reality 
of which it is aware? Does a purely diaphanous act give the 
imagination anything to work upon? And however these ques- 
tions may be answered, one general difficulty in any case con- 
fronts a theory for which reality is given to perception, or 
knowledge, face to face in its own proper person; how under 
such conditions can we ever be mistaken? If nothing mental 
intervenes between the act that constitutes consciousness and 
the entity that is known, and if the fact of its being known 
means always that it is identically present, what chance is there 
of its being known otherwise than as it actually is? Evidently 
we need a fuller construction of reality before the situation can 
be estimated fairly. 

§ 2. 5. Alexander 

I. The new theory of knowledge receives its most complete 
and systematic formulation in S. Alexander. In its more typi- 
cally neo-realistic aspect, Alexander's philosophy involves a 
psychology of the mental life conceived as reducible entirely to 



422 English and American Philosophy 

will-acts, all possible content being placed, as the neo-realistic 
insight demands, upon the object side. It would naturally 
seem as if it might be difficult to construct a science out of 
"acts" whose common nature we can describe only as cases of 
"awareness"; and it is indeed questionable whether Alexander's 
results will satisfy the scientific psychologist. As a matter of 
fact, however, he finds something more to add to their descrip- 
tion; he discovers in mental acts, that is, an experienced 
character of "direction" which is open to psychological dis- 
crimination. This character, which has a metaphysical bearing 
also, it is not quite easy to verify with assurance; and one 
may feel a natural doubt whether Alexander would himself 
have hit upon it had not a metaphysical presupposition first 
pointed the way. It is not to be interpreted as constituted 
simply by the varying nature of the objects present to con- 
sciousness, though this is what one might have thought likely 
from a theory that defines consciousness as the common ele- 
ment in experience, denuded of all varieties of content; and 
it is distinguished also from muscular sensations of activity 
about the head, which may accompany it. As distinct from 
both of these, Alexander thinks he can recognize an actual 
spatial movement, located vaguely in the brain, which charac- 
terizes the process of "enjoying" or of "living through" a 
mental activity, and which varies literally in physical direction 
with the difference of objective content.^ 

Meanwhile one point occasions some difficulty here; how do 
we come to have that knowledge of the mental fact which we 
clearly need to have if there is to be a science of psychology? 
For if knowledge is the relation between an act and an ob- 
jective content, the act itself, which by definition is not a 
content, cannot be known; it cannot place itself over against 
itself in the way that knowledge demands. Alexander meets 
the difficulty by distinguishing two different ways of knowing, 
— contemplative knowledge, where the object is thus set over 

'^ Space, Time and Deity, Vol. I, pp. 97 ff. 



5. Alexander 423 

against the mind, and the actual being, or experiencing, or 
enjoying of reality, where there is no such inner duplicity 
of subject and object. It is in this second sense only that 
I can be said to know my own inner life, as an immediate 
experience or enjoyment, and not as a contemplated object; 
I am aware of my awareness not as I strike a ball, but as I 
strike a stroke. And this is quite possibly a real distinction; 
but it does not seem to help out the particular difficulty in 
question. For a science exists only for contemplative thought. 
And while we might be in some immediate sense aware of 
the present experience in which we are immersed, this sort of 
knowledge would not survive the actual moment of the experi- 
encing; we could enjoy it inarticulately so long as it lasted, 
but to talk of it we should have to bring it before the mind 
in a different way, and a way that by definition is impossible. 
The intricacies in which Alexander finds himself involved here 
are strikingly apparent in his theory of recollection. When 
I remember an experience of mine in the past, I am not in 
reality, as I might at first sight suppose, contemplating a past 
event; this would be, again, to turn mind into a contemplated 
object. I am, instead, actually reliving the experience, but 
living it now in the past; in the enjoying experience, present, 
past, and future literally coalesce. Meanwhile it does not help 
to simplify the situation that in the case of other selves, which 
can neither be enjoyed nor contemplated, Alexander is com- 
pelled to resort to still a third definition of knowledge, as an 
"assurance" eked out by sympathetic imagination.^ 

2. Before turning to the further implications of this account 
of mind, in terms of its place in the system of reality, and its 
relation to the body in particular, a short account will need 
to be given of the general metaphysical presuppositions of 
Alexander's philosophy. Briefly, the matrix of reality is com- 
posed of Space and Time, in an intimacy of union which turns 
either into an abstraction when taken by itself. This ultimate 

^ Ibid., Vol. II, p. 37. 



424 English and American Philosophy 

stuff possesses no quality except the spatio-temporal quality 
of motion. From it certain fimdamental categories are de- 
ducible, in the sense of being determinations empirically impli- 
cated in every portion of space-time; and since there is no be- 
ing that is not made out of space-time stuff, they are neces- 
sary determinations for all reality alike. Thus existence, or de- 
terminate being, is the occupancy of any space-time in dis- 
tinction from any other space-time; substance is a piece or 
contour of space which is the scene of succession; things are 
complexes of motion differentiated within the one all-containing 
and all-encompassing system of motion; relations are the spatio- 
temporal connections of things which follow from the continuity 
of space-time; causality is the continuity between two different 
motions, the continuous transition of one physical event into 
another. And since space-time is the stuff out of which 
all reality is made, even the universals with which logic deals 
must themselves be identified with it; there is no logical realm 
of subsistence that has being apart from the world which the 
physical sciences know. A universal is a plan or form of 
configuration of space-time, a spatio-temporal pattern, made 
possible by the fact that space is uniform or constant in curva- 
ture. Each finite complex possesses a universal character in 
so far as, by embodying laws of construction, it admits with- 
out distortion of repetition in space-time, that is, can itself 
undergo change of place or time, or both, without alteration, 
or can be replaced by some other finite. Such universals are 
timeless, not as being out of time, but as being free from limi- 
tation to a particular time. 

3. For a clue to the completer understanding of this evolv- 
ing universe of space-time elements, we may turn back again 
to reality on the relatively high level of mind, and to the 
theory of the relation in which mind stands to the physical 
organism. Mind — which is nothing but the substantial totality 
of its acts of awareness — is neither completely identical with 
nervous structure, as materialism would maintain, nor yet a 



5'. Alexander 425 

new kind of stuff added to it, and existing alongside it. The 
mind is tlie nervous system, indeed, space-occupying, and 
having lines of "direction" literally identical with those of 
neural process ; but it is the nervous system blossoming out into 
a new quality or dimension — the capacity for awareness. In 
this way we are able to avoid both parallelism and interaction- 
ism. The nervous process is continuous, and never interrupted 
by something of a different order; and yet at the same time 
there is no reason to deny that mind has causal efficacy, since 
a neural activity which is also cognitive is by definition differ- 
ent, and so will act differently, from a purely unconscious one. 

Now this same relation in which mind stands to the vital 
processes of which it is a new qualitative development, is also 
to be found at various lower levels of the developing world. 
Such a novel "quality," empirically discoverable, though not 
open to metaphysical explanation, and differing from the cate- 
gories in that it is present only sporadically in the universe, 
and does not characterize every bit of space-time alike, appears 
successively in the shape of primary qualities, of materiality 
— apprehended in the sensation of resistance offered to the 
body, — of the secondary qualities, of life — revealed to us 
through organic and kinsesthetic sensations, which thus are as 
objective and non-mental as any others, — and, finally, of mind 
or consciousness. This situation Alexander sums up by say- 
ing that, at each level, the new quality is the "mind" of the 
special forms of the lower level which condition it, and, even, 
though here the analogy confessedly halts, that time is the 
mind of space. 

There is a sense in which, indeed, through his definition of 
the knowledge relation as the mere "compresence" of a mental 
act with its object, this might be held to be more than an 
analogy; if the definition is taken seriously, everything in the 
universe might actually appear to know everything else, since 
the relation of compresence holds universally. But even in 
terms of mind such a definition can hardly be pressed. There 



426 English and American Philosophy 

is obvious utility in it for a realism which asserts the identical 
presence of objects in knowledge; if all that is needed is that 
two things should be together in the same universe, our net is 
undoubtedly broad enough to catch any case of knowing that 
requires to be explained. But the trouble is that the explana- 
tion is too catholic and all-embracing, and the problem faces 
us, why we should ever be ignorant of anything. Accord- 
ingly Alexander, when he is speaking more precisely, quali- 
fies the definition by limiting knowledge in its proper sense 
to cases where one of the compresent elements is an "act 
of awareness." This, however, is to attach the peculiar dif- 
ferentia of knowledge to the internal structure of the know- 
ing act, where indeed it seems naturally to belong, but where 
Alexander's neo-realism nevertheless is precluded from finding 
it, except in the form of an ultimate mystery incapable of 
rational interpretation. And if the theory that knowledge 
involves the identical presence of an independently real object 
leads us to define knowing as a relation of "togetherness," the 
discovery that this relation is not an adequate account of the 
matter might very well be taken as a hint to revise the original 
theory, rather than the definition. 

4. There is another difficulty in the interpretation of Alex- 
ander's position here, of a still more fundamental sort. We 
have started with space-time as the stuff of reality. Now at 
best such a doctrine has an initial strangeness; space and time 
are very far from what we commonly regard as "stuff," and 
are sure to a first impression to appear too tenuous and abstract 
to supply the material for world building. Granting, how- 
ever, that this is nothing but a prejudice, there still remains 
a question about the status of "quality." Quality is called 
a "new creation"; but does this mean all that it might seem 
to mean? Is a quality something actually new in kind, and 
different, therefore, from space-time and motion? or is it still 
reducible to space-time elements, which have merely taken on 
"special laws of behavior"? Alexander asserts that qualities 



5. Alexander 427 

are "at once new, and expressible without residue in terms 
of the processes proper to the level from which they emerge," ^ 
which is perplexing, and seemingly an attempt to ride both 
horses at once. And whichever way we take it, we find doubts 
arising. If qualities are really different in kind, we have the 
very difficult notion of a world of one definite sort developing 
into a world of an essentially different sort; and in that case, 
too, we put in jeopardy our right to claim that space-time is 
the sole reality. To the degree in which a world character is 
different from motion, it is not motion; though since it is 
there, it must nevertheless be a part of reality. On the other 
hand, an attempt to identify new qualities with new laws 
of motion merely, is to seek to evade plain facts. This may 
perhaps be successful when applied to life. Even mind, when 
once sensational content is dismissed as belonging to the 
object, leaving only the occupancy of space and time, and 
spatial direction, as its experienced characters, we might be 
able to reduce to space-time elements. But this would only 
locate the residual problem in another place — in the things 
of the outer world; and wherever we locate them, secondary 
sense characters stand out as something sui generis, and impos- 
sible to refine away. 

5. Meanwhile the mind-body concept is used to ground an- 
other and particularly ingenious extension of philosophical 
doctrine, which brings us into connection with the field of re- 
ligion. In the infinite stretch of time, we are bound to suppose 
that new qualities of existence will appear in the future, as 
they have appeared in the past, bearing the same relation to 
the highest form of organization in the preceding stage that 
mind bears to the nervous structure. Thus we may expect 
that there will be — ^perhaps they are already in existence — 
angelic or Godlike beings for whom our minds will constitute 
a body, as neural matter constitutes ours. Such Gods, how- 
ever, cannot be the true objects of religion; for they are them- 

^Ibid., Vol. II, p. 45. 



428 English and American Philosophy 

selves but finite portions of the space-time world, and for them 
too a new and higher quality looms ahead. The true basis of 
religion is not God, but "deity" — the eternal urge of the uni- 
verse toward new and ever higher forms. Infinite deity thus 
does not exist, since attainment would make it finite; but the 
world in its infinity tends toward infinite deity. An empirical 
sense for this quality of deity in the world, to which the con- 
ception of the onward sweep of the cosmic process gives specu- 
lative justification, is the distinctive source of religious feel- 
ing, which is a feeling sui generis, and not*to be confused with 
moral or aesthetic values. It is of course to be recognized that 
the higher form of being to which creative activity is pointing 
cannot itself be mind, any more than mind can be identified 
with the vital organism of which it is a new qualitative ex- 
pression. 

6. The new theory of perception, which is probably to be 
regarded as the distinguishing mark of the neo-realistic move- 
ment in England, has been accepted more or less fully by a 
number of recent writers, though without the elaborate meta- 
physical background which it has in the case of Alexander. It 
is defended by Helen Wodehouse on psychological grounds, — 
which, however, stop short of most of the metaphysical dif- 
ficulties, — and by Percy T. Nunn in connection with the theory 
of scientific method; it underlies the acute critical analysis 
of the Kantian philosophy by H. A. Prichard; and it is ap- 
parently presupposed, though not very fully utilized, in the 
epistemology of C. D. Broad. Its most elaborate defence, 
next to that by Alexander, is to be found in the two volumes 
of John Laird. A variant of the same fundamental thesis 
appears in C. E. M. Joad, whose theory of knowledge follows 
views previously set forth in various published articles by G. 
Dawes Hicks. Here sense knowledge is taken as the active 
discrimination of qualities directly experienced as present in 
a real object or environment, the conclusion being drawn that 
since these "appearances" can be distinguished from the Real, 



Bertrand Russell 429 

as dependent for their discernment, though not for their exist- 
ence, on the discriminating mind, and since the mind is then 
able by its own activity to combine them in various — possibly 
mistaken — ways, a place is left for error, and so a serious 
objection to other forms of realism is avoided. 



§ 3. Bertrand Russell 

I. On the whole, the outstanding figure of the new realism 
is probably that of Bertrand Russell. This position he owes 
in the first place to his command of the modem mathematical 
logic, and to the remarkable subtlety and complexity of the 
abstract logical imagination which he brings from this field 
to that of philosophy proper. There is a spectacular quality 
in this well calculated to captivate disciples, and arouse the 
conviction, shared by Russell himself, that philosophy has at 
length, and for the first time, entered on its inheritance, and 
that hereafter no metaphysician need apply who cannot handle 
expertly the tools of s5anbolic logic. 

And irrespective of the importance of his detailed opinions, 
there is this further title also to distinction which Russell 
possesses; in spite of the fact that the burden of his phi- 
losophy is pure logic and impersonal truth-seeking, he stands 
out as one of the very few among the newer realists through 
whose arguments there shows a vivid emotional temperament, 
without which philosophy tends always to become a mere in- 
tellectual game. For Russell, as for Spinoza, philosophy is the 
austere vision of eternal truth, majestic in its isolation from 
man's paltry life. It is not the vision, even, of man's earthly 
residence, but of the unchanging bonds of logical implication, 
which are as sublime, and perhaps more interesting in their 
novelty, when they are the outgrowth of assumptions that have 
no special pertinency to the world of empirical fact. To this 
world, and to man's temporal life within it, there can belong 



430 English and American Philosophy 

little to satisfy our aspirations; for the philosophic vision, the 
game is not worth the candle. Only on the firm foundation of 
unyielding despair can the soul's habitation henceforth be 
built. "To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile uni- 
verse, to keep its evils always in view, always actively hated, 
to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, ap- 
pears to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevi- 
table." But it is just through this disillusionment which life 
brings, that philosophy gets ite chance and its justification; the 
realm of eternal logical natures, of ideals too high to be em- 
bodied, is that which alone is left as a refuge to the spirit of the 
free man who refuses to abase himself before the God of things 
as they are. 

2. For Russell, then, as for philosophical revolutionaries 
frequently in the past, nearly all that hitherto has gone under 
the name of philosophy it is necessary now to scrap; in par- 
ticular, the notion that philosophy has anything to say about 
the hopes and interests of man as a human being, or that it 
can attempt the task of thinking out a reasonable way of 
looking at the universe into which these shall enter as a sig- 
nificant factor, is to be set resolutely aside. Such a task has 
two defects: it does not give occasion for those qualities of 
austerity and intellectual distinction which characterize the 
superior mind, and which require for their exercise an aristo- 
cratic detachment and condescension; and it cannot meet the 
test of logical demonstration, which alone gives philosophy the 
title to be called scientific. It is evident that there is no par- 
ticular use in trying to reason with this delimitation of the 
philosopher's task; it is only one more of the many attempts 
to give legislative power to a personal type of interest. A nar- 
row set of very technical problems it may be that the new 
method is calculated to advance, — problems that have always 
been incidental to the work of the great philosophers, however, 
rather than constitutive of it. But so long as men's intellectual 
interests do actually have a wider swing, the whole history of 



Bertrand Russell 43 i 

philosophy shows that no attempt to browbeat them into ac- 
cepting some particular ideal of "science," which fails to gratify 
what they feel as a legitimate curiosity, can possibly succeed. 
What Russell himself indeed would seem to be thinking of 
under the head of "ethics" will possibly account in part for 
his indifference; from his own pessimistic standpoint of re- 
bellion against society, ethics is apparently identified with the 
social camouflage of customary morality, through which exist- 
ing powers and institutions create a morale favorable to their 
own continuance. But that all human values whatsoever, in- 
cluding the valuation which condemns the evils and hypocrisies 
of the world, are to be taken simply as facts of personal 
opinion, with no attempt to adjust them philosophically, or 
to think them in their relation to the universe at large, can in 
the nature of the case have itself nothing but a personal whim 
to back it. 

3. Meanwhile it is one unfortunate consequence of a dif- 
ference in the conception of aim and method here, that the 
philosopher who happens primarily to be interested in the 
"real" world finds it difficult ever to be quite sure to what 
extent Russell's results actually compete with his own. Phi- 
losophy, it appears, is concerned only with those logical re- 
lationships that belong to all possible worlds, and any prop- 
erty by which our actual world is distinguished from others 
that are abstractly possible must be ignored by it. But 
truths that hold of every possible world cannot give us any 
particularly useful information about the present one, or help 
much in solving problems to which its nature in particular 
gives rise; and unless, therefore, one finds his sufficient blessed- 
ness in the exercise of logical ingenuity for its own sake, he will 
get no special comfort from the new philosophy. In this pure 
logic differs from logic applied to science. No discovery of 
an actual causal series can be entirely irrelevant to human life; 
but it is easily possible, by taking arbitrary postulates, to 
trace very definite logical consequences from them, and yet 



432 English and American Philosophy 

for these consequences to be practically barren and lacking 
in human interest. Philosophy, if it is to be felt by most 
men as significant, will have to undertake the rationalization 
of actual human beliefs; and such beliefs inevitably take us 
beyond the mere manipulation of hypothetical concepts, and 
get their content from the practical demands of life and or- 
ganic needs. 

And to the lay mind, this leads to a question that arises con- 
tinually in connection with Russell's logical doctrine; when one 
finds various new and startling information about this or that 
familiar category, put forward as the indubitable testimony 
of logic, and then turns to the category itself only to learn 
that, in order to insure these consequences, it has to be de- 
fined in a way that shows only a remote connection with his 
familiar human meanings, he is at a loss to determine whether 
he has really found out more about the world in which he 
lives, or whether he has only found what follows from a set 
of definitions that make no pretence of conforming to his 
natural convictions. So, for example, of the new doctrine of 
the infinite, which Russell regards as perhaps the supreme 
achievement of the human intellect. I may define the infinite 
in such a way that it solves certain dialectical puzzles ; and for 
the technical purposes of the mathematician this may be 
sufficient, — whether it is so or not, is for the mathematician 
of course to decide. Meanwhile, however, other of the tra- 
ditional puzzles about the infinite, and indeed the only ones 
that have greatly impressed the popular mind, may very well 
be left where they were before, simply because the new defi- 
nition does not come into contact with them at all. For these 
difficulties can hardly be disentangled from the imaginative 
notion of a real world actually existing in time; and an infinity 
that is a property of classes which, as infinite, are given all 
at once by the defining property of their members, so that no 
question of "completion" ever arises, has nothing apparently in 
common with them. Instead, it goes on to reconstruct the 



Bertrand Russell 433 

notion of time itself to meet its dialectical demands, and so 
gets still further from the common world of experience. 

Of course the philosopher may deride the claims of the 
imagination, and may insist that logic is the only judge. But 
this is one question on which logic cannot itself pronounce — 
its own supremacy. Naturally, this does not mean that we 
have the right if we choose to be illogical or inconsistent. But 
whether a logical formulation of conditions sufficient to meet 
a purely logical demand can be allowed to dispense with the 
need for an appeal to concrete experience capable of being 
imaginatively contemplated, nothing in the way of dialectic 
merely can determine. For one who loves (logical) perfection 
more than life, there will be one answer; for one who loves life 
more than logical perfection there is likely to be a different 
one. And the fact accordingly that Russell's own results are 
quite reckless in their disregard of what things are experienced 
as, will seem unimportant, or very important, according to 
this initial bias. 

4. It becomes somewhat easier to appraise Russell's method, 
when we turn from the technical abstractions of mathematics 
to a problem that supposedly has to do with the real world 
— the problem of sense perception. But even here it is not 
certain that a decisive issue can be drawn. What in his later 
writings Russell apparently is trying to do, is to show that on 
the basis of certain relatively undeniable data — namely, the 
sense data, or sensibles, which any honest analysis of experi- 
ence is bound to leave on our hands whatever else it may seem 
possible to refine away, and the ultimate laws of logic, — we 
can, by a purely logical construction which makes no appeal 
to imexperienced or inferred entities, reach a result that will 
show all the properties actually found in the experienced ob- 
jects of perception. Now even if this attempt succeeds, it will 
still leave the main issue unsettled. It is quite possible that, 
by the exercise of a sufficient amount of logical ingenuity, cer- 
tain specified results might be shown to be the outcome of a 



434 English and American Philosophy 

number of different logical constructions, and yet no one of 
these represent the actual truth of the matter. Russell starts 
by assuming that ij such a logical construction can be car- 
ried out, it has the right of way, and ought to be preferred over 
any competing method. But this is, once more, to take for 
granted what needs establishing. As an interesting exercise 
in logic, the thing may be worth attempting; and for one who 
is interested in trying it, it will indeed be a part of the method 
to make as few assumptions as possible. But there is no de- 
cisive reason whatever for supposing that it gets us nearer the 
truth than other methods would, unless we already presuppose 
the superiority of logic to existence. The ideal would be, as 
Russell recognizes, the construction of the object out of my 
own sense data solely, since other persons' data are for me 
inferred facts, and therefore do not have the inevitability that 
the method desiderates. But this furnishes a good test of 
the plausibility of the ideal itself. If I could get along without 
other persons, I should be logically so much the better off, and 
no one would have cause for complaint except those in whom 
the human affections happen unfortunately to be "stronger 
than the desire for logical economy." But this candid ad- 
mission of a bias will of course, with most readers, have the 
opposite effect from that which Russell intends; if it comes to 
be a choice between our right to posit other selves, and an 
interest in logical economy, the superiority of the method of 
construction is likely to be compromised. 

And once grant the right, for reasons shown if not for purely 
logical reasons, to assume certain realities, and in all other 
respects Russell's method loses entirely the advantage of sim- 
plicity. We are, as will appear, compelled to multiply entities 
to a degree that to the imagination is overwhelming; while 
as an account of the psychological process of arriving at a 
belief in objects, there is no comparison between the involved 
intricacy of Russell's theory, and the straightforwardness of 
common-sense dualism. In fact, it would almost seem that the 



Bertrand Russell 435 

demand it makes upon logical ingenuity is what recommends 
the method. And if it is held that the theory does not pre- 
tend to be genetic, then it may be asked by what short cut 
man could have arrived at a complex logical construction with- 
out the use of logic; and any plausible answer is bound to 
introduce factors that throw doubt on Russell's logical bias. 

The theory is briefly to this effect. The data out of which 
the external world is to be constructed are, not permanent 
objects, but those irreducible and momentary qualia into which, 
when he looks at an object, an observer's experience can be 
analyzed. These sense data are not to be regarded as sub- 
jective; they are distinct from the mental act which appre- 
hends them, and since they are the elements out of which the 
physical world is constituted, they may even rightly be called 
physical. But neither are they the persisting physical objects 
of common sense. While independent of "mind," to the 
making of them goes a necessary relation to an organism ; they 
exist, that is, outside the mind, without continuing to exist 
when we are no longer looking at them. These appearances 
which the world presents to me from one particular point of 
view may be called a "perspective"; and besides the actual 
perspectives which enter into my experience and that of other 
human beings, there are an infinite number of other points 
of view, to each of which a certain set of data, or possible data, 
belongs. 

Now the common belief is that there is one real "thing" 
which the observer may view from different standpoints, each 
of these revealing to him a different "appearance" of the thing; 
for Russell's theory, on the contrary, the appearances are the 
sole facts that are real, and the thing is only that whole sys- 
tem of appearances of which each "aspect" of a thing is a 
member. A thing can thus be defined as the entire class of 
its appearances, including not only those appearances that are 
actual sense data to some one, but the sensibilia, or possible 
sense data, which represent the appearances that wotdd arise 



436 English and American Philosophy 

were a certain kind of observer in a certain relation to the 
object. These appearances are not in a common space; other- 
wise we should have the task of explaining how different qualia 
could occupy the same space at the same time. Each observer 
has only his own private space, and no place in the private 
world of one observer is identical with a place in the private 
world of another observer; the common space is, again, a logical 
construction from these private spaces. Given an object in one 
perspective, then, the problem is to form the system of all 
the objects correlated with it in all the perspectives, in a way 
to give a meaning to the properties which belong to the com- 
mon-sense notion of a single thing viewed under a multiplicity 
of aspects by many observers, and located at a definite point in 
a space common to all of them; and this is what by a very 
ingenious, but complicated and difficult construction, Russell 
thinks he has satisfactorily accomplished. 

5. Now to begin with, Russell's position would be more 
persuasive were it not that, even if "things" were actually as 
real as ordinarily we think them to be, it still would be pos- 
sible to justify the same data, and to effect the same con- 
struction. As a matter of fact we plainly never should have 
reached the notion of perspectives to begin with, except in 
terms of appearances to a "mind" occasioned by a cause 
existing in a common space, and standing in relation to dif- 
ferent organisms. And not only is this so; it is significant 
that we cannot state Russell's theory — at least it would be 
a highly difficult task which he makes no move to undertake 
— without continuing at every step to presuppose the common- 
sense world, and using it to give meaning to our description. 
With this world assumed, an object would of course be found 
appearing under various forms according to the position or the 
distance of an observer; and these appearances might be ar- 
ranged in series, such as could be used to define the location 
of the object which they presuppose, and on which their 
character depends. But just because the undertaking is equally 



Bertrand Russell 437 

compatible with two hypotheses, its success cannot be used to 
give one of them an advantage over the other. This advan- 
tage can only come, again, from an initial presumption against 
existents; and for one who does not share this presumption, 
Russell's attempt will only go to show — what hardly needed 
proving — that when we have analyzed a complex situation into 
elements, we can reverse the process in a way to redefine the 
whole into which the elements enter. What has been said above 
will seem to him to indicate clearly that what the logical con- 
struction starts from is not a mass of isolated sense data, but 
data already regarded as belonging to a system, which system 
has constantly to be held before us if we are not to lose our 
way completely. 

6. And it will probably seem to him, also, that apart from 
the lack of proof, and from the offence to common convictions, 
there are serious difficulties in any theory so far advanced about 
the metaphysical standing of these sensibles which logic uses, 
and in the account of knowledge v/hich they involve. The 
notion of sense data is least complicated in Russell's earlier 
writings, which follow, with some modifications, the familiar 
neo-realistic doctrine of an act of awareness directed upon a 
non-mental entity or "object"; and in so far, it shares in the 
objections to which such a doctrine is exposed. These go 
back in particular to one fundamental matter of dispute; is it 
so that the immediate "objects" of knowledge consist of quali- 
tative "natures," or essences? This is truer to appearances 
than to say that we know seiuations; but it still does not natu- 
rally fit the facts. Qualia, for common sense, characterize the 
object of perception; they do not constitute it. We seem to 
know concrete existences, qualified in various ways; and it is 
forcing language to speak of red or sour as an "object." It is 
only as we thus reinterpret sense experience, however, that the 
distinctive tenet of neo-realism gets a standing. On the more 
natural showing, "qualia" may indeed be literally present in 
experience, — indeed "dualism" in its own way would assent 



438 English and American Philosophy 

to this, — but "objects" are plainly not so conceived; and the 
outcome is, accordingly, the need to reduce reality from exist- 
ence to logical natures, on which comments already have 
been made. 

It should be added here that Russell himself would not 
allow that there is any point to this objection; the new logic 
has already shown it to be groundless. The difficulty is only 
met, however, by the device already noted — by redefining 
existence, that is. And the presuppositions of this new defi- 
nition are quite different from the simpler and more familiar 
meaning of the term. Russell has confessedly in mind the 
"existence theorem" of mathematics — that, for example, "an 
even prime exists." ^ And used in such a connection, it is 
no doubt possible to define existence as the property of a pro- 
positional function — an expression, that is, containing one or 
more undetermined constituents, and becoming a proposition 
as soon as the undetermined constituents are determined. So 
interpreted, the statement that "men exist" may be translated 
into the form, "there are values of x for which the propositional 
function 'x is a man' is true"; this is all one means by saying 
"there are men." And having thus ruled that existence shall 
have just this meaning, and no other, it is a simple matter to 
conclude that particular objects do not "exist"; the statement 
that they do exist is not so much false as meaningless, since we 
have limited the application of the term to something that is 
never a particular. But it seems evident that this is to ignore 
the alternative position, rather than to disprove it; if the issue 
involves a possible sense attaching to existence which lies 
beyond the realm of logic, — a meaning everywhere implicated, 
at any rate, in the practical life which Russell disparages, — it 
cannot be settled by starting from a purely logical property. 
And even the definition itself, when we pass from logic to com- 
mon life, does not succeed in escaping the problem. "There is 
a value of x for which 'x is a man' is true," will still seem 
^Monist, Vol. XXIX, p. 348. 



Bertrand Russell 439 

to the unsophisticated to mean, "some particular instance exists 
to make the general claim a true one." And to avoid this, 
it is necessary, again, to construct a whole new theory of 
reality, for which "sense data," and "facts," stand for ultimate 
and undefinable entities; and this brings up once more the 
same questions with which we started. 

7. Russell's own more specific doctrine of sense data, in 
its later developments, appears to be a compromise. It still 
starts from the doubtful thesis that the original objects of 
sense perception are qualia, and not things; without this, the 
presumption in favor of logical construction would come much 
less easily. But in taking these qualia now as momentary facts 
dependent on the organism, the notion of the "physical" is 
considerably complicated. Their infinite number and variety 
is in the first place to be reckoned with as a drawback — a quale 
for every possible standpoint of every possible kind of organ- 
ism; nor is the relation of actual to possible data left very 
plain. One interesting consequence is the explanation of "un- 
real" objects; ghosts and centaurs are things equally real with 
trees and mountains, except that they cannot be correlated in 
the same space construction, — an explanation convenient for 
a theory of error, but not intrinsically convincing. Meanwhile 
logically, also, the situation is at least confused when we find 
these ultimate qualia, out of which all objects are constructed, 
themselves made dependent upon the causal activity of com- 
mon-sense objects — the sense organ and the environment. 

There remain, it may be added, two speculative possibilities 
for the interpretation of sense data — either to cease trying to 
find any distinctive status for sensibles as opposed to uni- 
versaJs, and to reduce everything alike explicitly to pure logic 
— a path which certain of the American neo-realists are inclined 
to follow, — or else to abandon the neo-realistic distinction be- 
tween sense data and sensations, and return to sensationalism. 
This last alternative is already suggested in Russell's theo- 
retical preference for solipsism; and it is the doctrine which he 



440 English and American Philosophy 

adopts explicitly in his latest volume.^ But in thus abandon- 
ing the neo-realistic conception of "awareness," at least the 
foundation for our knowledge of a realm of logical entities 
would seem to call for reconsideration. 



§ 4. American Neo-Realism. Perry. Holt 

I. In America, neo-realism first became a generally recog- 
nized philosophical tendency through the publication, in 191 2, 
of a cooperative volume by six writers, called The New Real- 
ism; though for some years before this it had been trying itself 
out in a more tentative fashion in the philosophical journals. 
In just what relation it ought to be regarded as standing to 
English neo-realism, it is a little difficult to determine. The 
American group is plainly influenced very greatly by the logical 
doctrines of Russell, even more so on the whole than the ma- 
jority of his English colleagues; it agrees, also, in discarding 
sensations and images as psychical existents, and insists upon 
the identical presence of the object in knowledge. But the in- 
terpretation of consciousness itself takes an entirely different 
turn. The mental act of awareness which has so fundamental 
a place in British neo-realism is abandoned altogether, and 
instead there is adopted a behavioristic metaphysics, where 
a bodily response takes the place of the peculiar entity called 
awareness, and mind is conceived as a composite made up of 
the organism which reacts selectively to a cross section of the 
world, and of the objects to which it thus responds, these 
last being identical with the "content" of consciousness. The 
various essays in the book show indeed a certain amount of 
divergence, which on the whole has tended to increase since the 
book's appearance; and the position of W. P. Montague, in 
particular, with its attempt to explain consciousness in terms 
of energy, and knowledge as the relation of self-transcending 

* The Analysis of Mind. 



American Neo-Realism 441 

implication which brain states sustain to their extra-organic 
causes, has no obvious community with the "search-light" con- 
ception to which most of the others subscribe. But on a num- 
ber of general points there is a fairly exact agreement: — that 
the being and the nature of objects of knowledge are not con- 
ditioned on their being known; that these objects are directly 
present to the knowing consciousness, and are not mediated by 
sensations or ideas numerically distinct from them; that epi- 
stemology is not logically fundamental to science or meta- 
physics; that an entity possesses some relations independently 
of others, so that it is not necessary to know all of its relations 
in order to know any of them; that analysis, consequently, is 
the true method of philosophy, as against the anti-intellectual- 
ism of some modern philosophers; that entities may have 
being in a Platonic sense which is neither physical nor psychi- 
cal, but "neutral"; and that there is empirically a presumption 
in favor of pluralism rather than of monism. 

2. The psychological implications of the behavioristic 
theory of knowledge have been most fully explored by R. B. 
Perry, The theory is, to repeat, that the knower is the physical 
organism. This organism reacts to certain selected parts of the 
environment, and thereby constitutes these portions the con- 
tent of knowledge; the same identical objects exist also as 
physical facts, and all that happens to them, when they be- 
come conscious, is that they get a special connection, a special 
grouping, through their relation to the reacting body. The 
whole situation accordingly is interpretable without going be- 
yond the realities with which the physical sciences deal, and 
having to assume a special sort of reality called consciousness, 
or knowledge, or the psychical. The psychical is only the 
physical related in a peculiar fashion; and the same methods 
of external observation that are sufficient in the physical 
Sciences, can be applied to the psychological life of mind as 
well. 

Behaviorism as an ideal of method applied to the actual 



442 English and American Philosophy 

science of psychology it is not necessary to bring in question 
here. It undoubtedly supplies a convenient mode of approach 
to certain problems; though it is probable that the zeal for 
innovation has led it to make much wider claims than will 
eventually be sustained. But even were it finally to prove 
sufficient for the needs of psychology as a special science, 
philosophy would still have to justify it in the light of larger 
considerations. And when we try to defend the conception 
as an ultimate creed, it will appear to begin with that all the 
facts appealed to are capable of being construed in a dif- 
ferent way, which retains the traditional prejudice in favor 
of an "inner" life, not open directly to the gaze of an observer. 
It is true, as the behaviprist contends, that in the particular 
field of conscious experience which we call sense perception, 
the objects perceived are identical with the part of the en- 
vironment to which the perceiving organism is related in 
the way of response; and since an observer can himself per- 
ceive this organic reaction along with approximately the same 
field of objects, he can tell directly, within certain limits of 
error, what the content of my mind at the moment is. Equally, 
though with much more chance of mistake, he can, without 
necessarily asking for information from his subject, interpret 
the purposes of a human agent, by watching to see how he 
reacts to things bodily. But once grant our ability on any 
terms to know real objects, and there is a perfectly simple 
way, again, of accounting for this; it is because the observer 
has himself the same inner experience, in an identical situation, 
that he finds the content of knowledge which reveals the ex- 
ternal world the same for him as for his subject, rather than 
because physical facts, in special relationships, displace the 
mental altogether. 

And to this latter thesis there are positive objections that 
appeal strongly to common sense. In the first place our 
natural judgment would unquestionably be, that whatever may 
be true of "things," other persons do at least have something in 



R. B. Perry 443 

the nature of ideas, sensations, feelings, which are not identi- 
cally present in my consciousness, and which can never be. 
Perry consistently discards this conviction as a mistaken 
prejudice, but without notable success in placating common 
sense.^ What in the end his argument comes to is, that we 
do as a matter of fact know the very same pain, the very same 
idea, of which our neighbor is conscious, since otherwise our 
minds would never meet on common ground; and if the case 
is actually so, it is inconsistent with the supposition that con- 
sciousness is "private" to a single person. Now if a thing 
be reducible to its logical nature or description, as neo-realism 
tends to hold, the conclusion is a fair one; the same logical 
content that characterizes the pain is indeed present to my 
knowing consciousness, else I could not know it for what it 
is. But on the more familiar supposition that the existence 
of a fact is something over and above its descriptive charac- 
teristics, sameness of content ceases to identify the two ex- 
periences. And most people it will be impossible to argue 
out of the conviction that there is a reality, a tang, a feeling 
presence, which sharply separates the pain my neighbor feels 
from any idea of it that I can possibly form; and that this ac- 
tual pain is something that never is brought within the circle 
of what I myself directly experience. 

About an "idea" there is more chance that the plain man may 
find himself confused by argument, since an idea, in one of 
its meanings, may be regarded as itself just a bit of logical 
content; it is possible to say therefore, in a more literal sense, 
that we have the "same" idea. But still it would commonly 
be recognized that, in addition to the identity of abstract 
content, there is also the psychological fact — the awareness 
of having an idea; and as a psychological existence, this is still 
different in the two cases. And as a reply to this the logical 
consideration in which Perry finds the source of our mistaken 
prejudice — the failure to recognize, namely, that an identical 
^Present Philosophical Tendencies, pp. 286 ff. 



444 English and American Philosophy 

element can belong to more than one complex at the same 
time — is quite irrelevant, since it is itself interpreted in a 
way that begs the question. It is true that the same a may 
be the second letter in man, and the fifth in mortal, ij we ab- 
stract from a's actual existence, and think of it only in its 
character as denoting a certain sound; as an actual letter in 
actual printed words, however, the a's are not the same, and 
the illustration turns against its user. 

3, Meanwhile from the side of the organic activity, or re- 
sponse, there is difficulty of another sort in adapting behavior- 
ism to the accepted understanding of experience — a difficulty 
brought out more especially when we turn to the ideal elements 
in knowledge. If I open my eyes to my surroundings, an ob- 
server can tell what I see, because he is seeing the same things 
for himself; if I close my eyes, and allow my thoughts to range, 
I have at least rendered his task much more arduous and un- 
certain. The neo-realist will reply that in so far as I can get at 
the incipient muscular contractions which are involved in think- 
ing, — or, as he would say, which are thought, — I am again in 
a position to tell directly what is in my neighbor's mind. But 
at least when we pass thus from things to words, the situa- 
tion takes a turn that is not without possibilities of trouble. 
Articulation is to be sure a form of behavior; though it might 
seem the natural thing to call it a response to an interlocutor, 
rather than to the content of the idea. But at any rate, from 
the standpoint of an observer, the situation is appreciably 
different in the two cases. Since the observer has himself no 
way of seeing an ideal content, but envisages only the "activity" 
aspect of mind, external observation is no longer a sufficient 
method for getting directly at the inner life; "having an idea" 
becomes in terms of its content a quite different experience 
from observing a word reaction, whereas when I perceive a 
perception, the observing experience is supposed to have the 
same content as the perception itself. In so far as an idea 
leads to some future dealing with its object, by awaiting the 



R. B. Perry 445 

issue an observer might indeed immediately perceive the idea's 
content. But the perception of a chain of physical processes 
which end in an object's presence after an indefinite lapse of 
time, is still utterly unlike the immediate experience of "hav- 
ing an idea"; in it the future fact is evidently not present at the 
start as an existent content, whereas the "idea" does have for 
me a present content, which more or less adequately forecasts 
or represents the future one, and to which the biological process 
open to the observer bears descriptively not the slightest re- 
semblance. 

Accordingly, to fit the facts, we must enlarge our notion 
of response, and, since any possible object of knowledge can 
be present "in idea," must find a way to interpret its relation 
to response in present rather than in future terms, unless we 
are prepared to reduce "thought," prior to its completion in 
action, to the bare muscular contraction of speaking, which 
every one knows that really it is not. Now English neo- 
realism, interpreted as the "awareness" of a Platonic world 
of timeless being, may perhaps compass this; but for behavior- 
ism it apparently is possible only by abandoning the notion of 
biological response in any sense that gives it scientific value. 
Metaphysically, Perry saves his theory from the charge of 
materialism, with which otherwise it might excusably be con- 
fused, by holding that the physical is itself subordinate to more 
ultimate logical entities. But his whole theory of knowledge 
rests upon a physical fact, the organism; its scientific plausi- 
bility is dependent upon this. And the sense in which a physical 
body, in scientific terms, and without having recourse to no- 
tions that leave the physical fact behind, can respond to an 
abstract logical hypothesis, or to a comprehensive ethical ideal, 
or to an event in the future or the past, without any inter- 
position of "ideas," is at least something that cannot be taken 
for granted as requiring no special explanation. An animal 
may respond to an abstraction in this sense, that what sets 
off his action is some partial feature of an object which he 



446 English and American Philosophy 

observes, — for example, a particular shape or a particular shade 
of color; there is no great difficulty so long as something real 
is present in the environment which has this special character. 
But how does the physical organism pick out of its environment 
the ideal of Plato's republic, or the square root of minus one? 
Perry simplifies his own task by keeping usually within the 
range of situations where biology, as a non-metaphysical science, 
moves; and were we to stop with materialism, this would be 
legitimate. But if the metaphysics of realism is to be taken as 
logical rather than identified with physics, a new and difficult 
set of problems will need to be faced, 

4. A sketch of what the program of reducing the universe 
to logical or neutral entities might be like, is suggested by an- 
other of the six realists, E. B. Holt. From such a standpoint, 
Being appears as the ultimate category, and everything alike 
has being of which it is possible to think at all. Philosophy 
attempts to give unity of system to the realm of being, by 
means of the property of ''activity" which belongs to logical 
propositions, and through which they generate terms; this rela- 
tion of a generating proposition to the series of terms which 
satisfy its demands is the solution of the problem of the one 
and the many. The ideal of philosophy would be a single 
rigidly deductive sj^stem, where a few logical propositions, or 
even one, generate all the multitudinous detail of the world we 
know. The particular purpose of Holt's book is to apply this 
ideal of method to the concept of consciousness in particular, 
and to show thereby the validity of the "search-light" theory 
of behaviorism. 

In its actual carrying out, however, the method develops 
certain limitations. In the first place, it does not even make a 
pretence of deducing the particular facts of the world — the 
rock on which logical theories of reality have always foundered ; 
what it is actually concerned with is concepts simply, and the 
definition of complex concepts in logically simpler terms, each 



E. B. Holt 447 

new state of complexity in the world being reducible to the same 
neutral elements that appear in the preceding stage, and, in 
the end, to a few logical indefinables. Thus, presupposing that 
we have been successful in reaching the stage of organic mechan- 
ism, we need to show that from some character of this we can 
deduce just those characteristics that empirically we find be- 
longing to what we are acquainted with as consciousness; and 
this we accomplish through the notion of selective response to 
limited aspects of the — ultimately neutral — environment. Even 
in this conceptual sense the method meets many difficulties; 
one notable difficulty, for example, is the case of quality. If 
we were to accept qualitative differences as they seem to exist 
for experience, we obviously should have something incapable 
of being analyzed without remainder into the terms that de- 
scribe energetic, and, ultimately, spatial and logical systems; 
and accordingly Holt eliminates qualitative natures from the 
world, and reduces them to the "density" of physiological 
series. 

But now even supposing the work accomplished of defining 
all concepts in a few ultimate logical terms, we have still the 
more searching task of making plausible the thesis that these 
differing terms, with their including propositions, are all there 
is to the universe, and that "reality" and "existence" are them- 
selves nothing but special complications of such logical entities. 
And the more successful we are in thus reducing reality to a 
logical formula, the less capable in a way is this formula of 
solving our difficulty as to how an organism can respond to ab- 
sent, and ideal, and non-existent entities, simply because it has 
itself no place for actual organisms, — ^which alone respond to 
anything, — but only for the concept organism, and the concept 
of response. But because the physical can be defined in logical 
terms, it does not follow that it can be reduced to such logical 
terms without remainder, unless we have already prejudged 
a vital point in metaphysics; for a definition only pretends to 



448 English and American Philosophy 

cover the "nature" of things, and not to be interchangeable 
with the things themselves. 

5. Two other members of the original group of realists have 
contributed to the recent literature of the movement, W. T. 
Marvin in the form of elementary text books, and E. G. Spauld- 
ing in a more pretentious volume, which contains perhaps the 
most thorough criticism yet attempted of rival philosophies 
from a neo-realistic point of view. Spaulding's form of realism, 
however, shows signs of development in several directions. The 
main thesis of the book is still the doctrine of "external rela- 
tions" as applied to knowledge, and the need of substituting 
for the traditional logical emphasis on substance and causality 
the newer logic of relational implication; and the fact that 
for any form of philosophy there is at least one instance where 
the object of knowledge must be taken realistically as inde- 
pendent of its being known, — the state of affairs, namely, which 
this philosophy defends as true, — serves to justify the realistic 
doctrine, and to convict its rivals of being self-refuting. The 
relational theory of consciousness, however, including its be- 
havioristic form, seems to be given up by Spaulding, in favor 
of a somewhat obscure conception of consciousness as a "di- 
mension" — a theory which again assumes that because a thing 
can be defined as having certain characteristics, we have the 
right to stop with these in stating what we mean by its existence. 
Spaulding's notion of "truth" as a relation of correspondence 
between the existent and the "subsistent" is also an innova- 
tion, and seems to be looking back to a position conceived by 
neo-realists generally to have been outgrown. The correspond- 
ence is not with the "mental," to be sure, since the subsistent 
is just as truly non-mental as the physical is. But this avoid- 
ance of the older "dualistic" realism — necessary if we are not 
to give up all that is distinctive in neo-realistic claims — is 
effected only at the expense of putting truth and error wholly 
outside the realm of belief — a mental fact — where they are 
ordinarily taken as residing. 



Conclusion 449 

§ 5. Conclmion 

I. Neo-realism is the latest of the speculative tendencies that 
have arisen to the dignity of a recognized school, though 
it does not by any means exhaust the philosophical permuta- 
tions that recent years have brought forth. In America, more 
particularly, where the authority of tradition is weaker, and 
a more open mind is apt to be shown to contemporary winds 
of doctrine, there are a number of recent philosophers who 
stand somewhat apart from the various competing systems, and 
attempt to profit from them all alike. Thus J. E. Boodin 
calls his philosophy a pragmatic realism. Boodin finds five 
irreducible characters of reality — a "stuff" — being — conceived 
in the form of active energy complexes, time, space, conscious- 
ness, and form or selective direction. Consciousness is inter- 
preted as an "awareness" which lights up reality in spots; it is 
not the essential character of the "self," which is a group of 
active conative tendencies, cooperating as a form of energy 
with other energies in the physical world. In Dewitt H. 
Parker, a closer approach is made to neo-realism. Parker draws 
a distinction between self, and mind. The self is a set of ac- 
tivities which, by coming into the presence of a sensuous con- 
tent, makes this a portion of an individual mind; these sensa- 
tions, meanwhile, are themselves objective facts independent of 
perceiving, though not independent of the body, whose co- 
operation is called for in their production. The same content 
may figure in any number of different minds, which thus join 
in its control; and we may reasonably interpret the natural 
object in so far as it seems to exist when human beings are 
not perceiving it, as likewise in the form of sensations suffering 
the control of extra-human activities, capable of being inter- 
preted after the analogy of a self. There is no direct contact 
between one self and another, comparable to the connection of 
activities within a self. But different selves are indirectly con- 



4SO English and American Philosophy 

nected through the sense elements which are their common 
termini ; and this overlapping of minds supplies a basis for their 
communication and interaction. In D. C. Macintosh, again, a 
theory of the identical presence of an independent reality in 
perception, conceived as necessary in order to avoid agnos- 
ticism, is combined with a claim that certain qualities of the 
real object, the secondary qualities, it does not possess when 
it is not perceived, but acquires through the creative activity of 
the psychical subject. Here the ultimate interest is a religious 
one, and issues in a vindication of God as an immediate object 
of empirical experience. 

2. If the historian of the future is to be in a position to 
find a dramatic tendency in the evolution of philosophy, it is 
clearly not in the year 1922 that his plot will culminate. The 
almost feverish activity of the last few decades is in striking 
contrast to the apathy with which the nineteenth century 
opened; but the universe still seems as far from having come 
to the consciousness of its own rationality in the philosophical, 
as in the political field. Only an optimist, or a convinced 
partisan, is likely to find in the discussions of the present 
moment the resolution of that uncertainty and lack of common 
agreement which has so often been used to put the philosopher 
apologetically on the defensive. In spite of what is perhaps 
a growing disposition on the part of members of one school to 
learn in matters of detail from another, the philosophical at- 
mosphere is still sharply controversial rather than coopera- 
tive, and the leading schools all diverge at the very outset by 
insisting on the adoption of a special, and usually a more or 
less non-natural standpoint, before the pupil can be instructed 
in the one true faith. Occasionally a voice is raised against 
the proprietary attitude in philosophic doctrine, in the inter- 
ests of greater catholicity. This is true, for example, of a re- 
cent volume by W. S. Sheldon. But the particular solution 
offered, in terms of the mutual interdependence of external and 
internal relations, — or, put more simply, in terms of the need for 



Conclusion 45 1 

recognizing the claims alike of the persistence or integrity of 
every actual aspect of experience, and of its development under 
the conditions imposed upon it by the environment — is some- 
what too abstract to show the way clearly to a reform. 

William James has perhaps indicated where a start toward 
agreement might be made; if the philosopher would be more 
frank in confessing to the human interests which guide his 
search for truth, it might be that these competing interests, 
brought into the open, would prove less obnoxious to one an- 
other than a comparison of their outcome in terms of logic 
merely would suggest. Even here, however, a twist might be 
given to the matter unduly pleasing to the sceptic. Why not, 
it might be asked, admit at once that a philosophical system 
is nothing but a work of art, an attempt to give some favorite 
emotional reaction a logical body and expression such as will 
gratify our sense of speculative consistency. Once recognize 
that a philosophy is not the one exclusive truth about reality, 
but the gratification of a cosmic mood, and it will appear that 
the rivalry of systems has no foundation. This seems to be 
the attitude recommended in the speculative essays of a recent 
candid friend, rather than lover of philosophy, L. P. Jacks. 
The true angle of approach to philosophy is from the side of 
the universe, rather than of man as a thinking animal. The 
world is not to be regarded as a Sphinx engaged in setting prob- 
lems for us to solve, but as an immediately satisfying work of 
art, in which speculative activities have indeed a place, but only 
along with other forms of living. A philosophy which aims to 
cover reality must not forget, accordingly, to find a place for 
itself also within the universal scheme; and thereby it becomes, 
not an impersonal passer of judgment on the world, but itself 
one form among others of the world's activities. In other 
words, as an expression of the cosmic whole, philosophy is not 
my philosophy, superior in truth to, and destined to take the 
place of, all the rest; it is the entire history of philosophic 
thinking as a part of the dramatic output of the universe. 



452 English and American Philosophy 

But now is such a theory itself also only another figure in 
the universal drama? This can be professed in words, but it 
seems very doubtful whether in reality higher pretensions for 
it can be avoided. And at least the philosopher himself can 
scarcely afford to recognize that his results are nothing but an 
exercise in logic built about a special mood, if he is to retain 
very long his pleasure in philosophizing. That this is what 
systems of philosophy have often been, it would be difficult to 
deny entirely; and probably to the end, since we are dealing 
with matters for which no decisive verification is conceivable, 
individual preferences will help determine for each man what 
vision of reality will seem most sane and reasonable, and phi- 
losophers will never quite see eye to eye. And of course so long 
as the tendency prevails to insist on ruling out as meaningless 
problems that appeal to other minds, in the interest of some 
exclusive vision, no agreement can come about till all phi- 
losophers are converted to a single system; and no one who 
knows philosophers can reasonably expect this to happen soon. 
But if a fraction of the effort once were made to enter into the 
difficulties and the insights of other thinkers that now goes to 
following out the logical consequences of a single insight and 
defending it against competitors, philosophers might fairly be 
expected to discover that logical agreement, like ethical agree- 
ment, is less improbable than the particularism of our first and 
natural instincts might lead us to suppose; since it is in fact 
to a narrow and exclusive sense of what is valuable, rather than 
to rational considerations, that this philosophic particularism 
is most always due. "Systems" would probably suffer in the 
process; but systems have had their chance, and have still 
to show their ability to cure the ills of philosophy. 



INDEX TO AUTHORS 



Abercrombie, John, (1780-1844). In- 
quiries Concerning the Intellectual 
Powers, 1830; The Philosophy of 
the Moral Feelings, 1833. p. 37. 

Adams, George P. Idealism and the 
Modern Age, 1919. p. 298. 

Adamson, Robert, (1852-1902). On 
the Philosophy of Kant, 1879; 
Fichte, 1881 ; The Development of 
Modern Philosophy, 1903; The 
Development of Greek Philosophy, 
1908; A Short History of Logic, 
1911. pp. 297, 357. 

Alcott, Amos Bronson, (1799-1888). 
p. 214. 

Alexander, Samuel. Moral Order and 
Progress, 1889; Locke, 1908; Space 
Time, and Deity, 1920. pp. 194, 
421. 

Allen, Grant (1848-1899). Physio- 
logical Aesthetics, 1877; The Col- 
our Sense, 1879; Force and En- 
ergy, 1888; The Evolution of the 
Idea of God, 1897. P- 184. 

Ames, Edward Scribner. Psychology 
of the Religious Experience, 1910. 

P- 40 X- 

Argyle, Eighth Duke of, (1823-1900). 
The Reign of Law, 1867; Primeval 
Man, 1869; The Unity of Nature, 
1884; The Philosophy of Belief, 
1896. p. 200. 

Arnold, Matthew, (1822-1888). Cul- 
ture and Anarchy, 1869; St. Paul 
and Protestantism, 1870; Litera- 
ture and Dogma, 1873; God and 
the Bible, 1875. p. 125. 

Arnold, Thomas, (1795-1842). p. 97. 

Atkinson, Henry G. p. 129. 

Austin, John, (1790-1859). The 
Province of Jurisprudence Deter- 
mined, 1832 ; Lectures on Juris- 
prudence, 1863. p. 91. 



Bailey, Samuel, (1791-1870). Essay 
on the Formation and Publication 
of Opinions, 1821 ; Essays on the 
Pursuit of Truth and on the Prog- 
ress of Knowledge, 1829; Review 
of Berkeley's Theory of Vision, 
1842 ; Theory of Reasoning, 1851 ; 
Letters on the Philosophy of the 
Human Mmd, 1855, 1858, 1863. 

P- 37- 

Baillie, James B. The Origin and 
Significance of Hegel's Logic, 1901; 
An Outline of the Idealistic Con- 
struction of Experience, 1906; 
Studies in Human Nature, 1921. 
p. 297. 

Bain, Alexander, (1818-1903). The 
Senses and the Intellect, 1855, (4th 
ed. 1894) ; The Emotions and the 
Will, 1859, (4th ed. 1899) ; Mental 
and Moral Science, 1868; Logic, 
Deductive and Inductive, 1870; 
Mind and Body, 1873; Practical 
Essays, 1884; Dissertations on 
Leading Philosophical Topics, 1903; 
Autobiography, 1904. p. 87. 

Baldwin, James Mark. Handbook of 
Psychology, 1890-91 ; Mental De- 
velopment in the Child and the 
Race, 189s; Social and Ethical In- 
terpretations in Mental Develop- 
ment, 1897; Dictionary of Phi- 
losophy and Psychology, 1901-05; 
Fragments in Philosophy and Sci- 
ence, 1902; Development and Evo- 
lution, 1902; Thought and Things, 
1 906-11; Darwin and the Humani- 
ties, 1909; The Individual and So- 
ciety, 1911; History of Psychology, 
1913; Genetic Theory of Reality, 

1915- P- 409- 
Balfour, Arthur James. A Defence 
of Philosophic Doubt, 1879; The 



453 



454 



Index 



Foundations of Belief, 1895; Theism 
and Humanism, 1915; Essays Spec- 
ulative and Political, 1920. p. 320. 

Ballantyne, John, (1778-1830). An 
Examination of the Human Mind, 
1828. p. 37. 

Barratt, Alfred, (1844-1881). Phy- 
sical Ethics, 1869; Physical Met- 
empirics, 1883. pp. 194, 326. 

Bawden, Henry Heath. The Prin- 
ciples of Pragmatism, 1910. p. 407. 

Bax, Ernest Belfort. The Problem 
of Reality, 1892 ; The Roots of 
Reality, 1907; The Real, the Ra- 
tional and the Alogical, 1921. p. 
298. 

Bentham, Jeremy, (1748-1832). A 
Fragment on Government, 1776; 
An Introduction to the Principles 
of Morals and Legislation, 1789, 
(2nd ed. 1823); A Table of the 
Springs of Action, 1815; The Anal- 
ysis of the Influence of Natural 
Religion Upon the Temporal Hap- 
piness of Mankind, 1822; Book of 
Fallacies, 1824; The Rationale of 
Punishment, 1830; Deontology or 
Science of Morality, 1834; Works, 
1838-43. pp. I, so, n, 73, 75, 92. 

Boodin, John Elof. Trufeh and Real- 
ity, 1 911; A Realistic Universe, 
1916. p. 449. 

Bosanquet, Bernard. Logic as the 
Science of Knowledge (in Essays 
in Philosophical Criticism), 1883; 
Knowledge and Reality, 1885 ; 
Logic, 1888, (2nd ed. 1911) ; Es- 
says and Addresses, 1889; History 
of Aesthetic, 1892 ; The Civiliza- 
tion of Christendom, 1893 ; The 
Essentials of Logic, 1895 ; The 
Psychology of the Moral Self, 
1897; The Philosophical Theory of 
the State, 1899, (3rd ed. 1920) ; 
The Principle of Individuality and 
Value, 1912; The Value and Des- 
tiny of the Individual, 1913; The 
Distinction Between Mind and Its 
Objects, 1913; Three Lectures on 
Aesthetic, 191S; Social and Inter- 
national Ideals, 1917; Some Sug- 
gestions in Ethics, 1918; Implica- 



tion and Linear Inference, 1920; 
What Religion is, 1920; The Meet- 
ing of Extremes in Contemporary 
Philosophy, 192 1. pp. 264, 286, 298. 

Bowne, Borden P., (1847-1910). Phi- 
losophy of Herbert Spencer, 1874; 
Studies in Theism, 1879; Meta- 
physics, 1B82, (2nd ed. 1898) ; In- 
troduction to Psychological Theory, 
1886; Philosophy of Theism, 1887; 
Principles of Ethics, 1892; Theory 
of Thought and Knowledge, 1897; 
Personalism, 1908; Kant and Spen- 
cer, 1912. p. 324. 

Bradley, Francis Herbert. Ethical 
Studies, 1876; Mr. Sidgwick's He- 
donism, 1877; The Principles of 
Logic, 1883; Appearance and Real- 
ity, 1893, (2nd ed. 1897) ; Essays 
on Truth and Reality, 1914. pp. 
250, 269, 299. 

Bray, Charles, (1811-1884). Philoso- 
phy of Necessity, 1841, (2nd ed. 
1861). p. 129. 

Bridges, John Henry, (1832-1906). 
Comte's General View of Positiv- 
ism, 1865 ; The Unity of Comte's 
Life and Doctrine, 1866, 1911; Five 
Discourses on Positive Religion, 
1882; Essays and Addresses, 1907; 
Illustrations of Positivism, 1907. 
p. 191. 

Broad, Charles Dunbar. Perception, 
Physics, and Reality, 1914. pp. 342, 
428. 

Brown, Thomas, (1778-1S20). Ob- 
servations on the Zoonomia of 
Erasmus Darwin, 1798; Observa- 
tions on the Nature and Tendency 
of the Doctrine of Mr. Hume con- 
cerning the Relation of Cause and 
Effect, 180S, (3rd ed., entitled In- 
quiry into the Relation of Cause 
and Effect, 181 7) ; Lectures on the 
Philosophy of the Human Mind, 
1820. pp. 13, 20, 22, 23, 24, 37. 

Browning, Robert, (1812-1889). p. 
202. 

Buckle, Henry Thomas, (1821-1862). 
History of Civilization in England, 
1857, 1861; Miscellanies and Post- 
humous Works, 1872. p. 130. 



Index 



455 



Burke, Edmund, (i 729-1797). p. i. 

Butler, Samuel, (1835-1902). Life 
and Habit, 1877; Evolution Old 
and New, 1879; God the Known 
and God the Unknown, 1879; Un- 
conscious Memory, 1880; Luck or 
Cunning, 1886. p. 326. 

Caird, Edward, (1835-1908). A Crit- 
ical Account of the Philosophy of 
Kant, 1877; Hegel, 1883; Social 
Philosophy and Religion of Comte, 
1885; The Critical Philosophy of 
Immanuel Kant, 1889; Essays on 
Literature and Philosophy, 1892 ; 
The Evolution of Religion, 1893; 
The Evolution of Theology in the 
Greek Philosophers, 1904; Lay 
Sermons and Addresses, 1907. p. 
248. 

Caird, John, (1820-1898). An In- 
troduction to the Philosophy of 
Religion, 1880; Spinoea, 1888. p. 
248. 

Calderwood, Henry, (1830-1897). 
The Philosophy of the Infinite, 
1854, (2nd ed. 1861) ; Handbook 
of Moral Philosophy, 1872, (14th 
ed. 1888) ; The Relations of Mind 
and Brain, 1877, (3rd ed. 1892) ; 
The Relations of Science and Re- 
ligion, 1 881 ; Evolution and Man's 
Place in Nature, 1893; David 
Hume, 1898. p. 38. 

Calkin, Mary Whiton. Introduction 
to Psychology, 1901; The Persist- 
ent Problems of Philosophy, 1907, 
(4th ed. 191 7) ; A First Book in 
Psychology, 1909; The Good Man 
and the Good, 1918. p. 298. 

Carlyle, Thomas, (179S-1881). p. 
208. 

Carpenter, William Benjamin, (1813- 
1885). The Principles of General 
and Comparative Physiology, 1839, 
(5th ed. 1855) ; Principles of Men- 
tal Physiology, 1874; Nature and 
Man, 1888. p. 197. 

Carr, Herbert Wildon. The Philoso- 
phy of Change, 1914; The Phi- 
losophy of Benedetto Croce, 191 7; 
The General Principle of Relativity 



in its Philosophical and Historical 
Aspect, 1920. p. 407. 

Case, Thomas. Physical Realism, 
1888. p. 341. 

Chalmers, Thomas, (1780-1847). The 
Christian and Civic Economy of 
Large Towns, 1821-6; On Politi- 
cal Economy in connection with 
the Moral State and Moral Pros- 
pects of Society, 1832 ; The Adap- 
tation of External Nature to the 
Moral and Intellectual Constitu- 
tion of Man, 1834; Sketches of 
Moral and Mental Philosophy, 
1836; Natural Theology, 1836. p. 
37. 

Chambers, Robert, (1802-1871). 
Vestiges of the Natural History of 
Creation, 1844. p. 131. 

Channing, William Henry, (1810- 
1884). p. 125. 

Clifford, William Kingdon, (184S- 
1879). Seeing and Thinking, 1879; 
Lectures and Essays, 1879; The 
Common Sense of the Exact Sci- 
ence, 1885. pp. 186, 326, 329. 

Cobbe, Frances Power, (1822-1904). 
The Theory of Intuitive Morals, 
1855; Broken Lights, 1864; Dar- 
winism in Morals, 1872 ; The 
Hopes of the Human Race, 1874; 
The Scientific Spirit of the Age, 
1888; Life, by Herself, 1894. p. 

I2S. 

Coffey, Peter. The Science of Logic, 
1912; Ontology, 1914; Epistemol- 
ogy, 1917. p. 341. 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, (1772- 
1834). The Friend, 1809-10; Bi- 
ographia Literaria, 181 7; Aids to 
Reflection, 1825; On the Consti- 
tution of Church and State, 1830; 
Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, 
1840; Essay on Method, 1845. p. 
III. 

Combe, George, (1788-1858). Es- 
says on Phrenology, 1819; Elements 
of Phrenology, 1824; The Constitu- 
tion of Man considered in rela- 
tion to External Objects, 1828, (8th 
ed. 1847) ; Lectures on Moral Phi- 
losophy, 1840; On the Relation 



456 



Index 



between Religion and Science, 1857. 
p. 88. 

Congreve, Richard, (1818-1899). 
The New Religion in its Attitude to 
the Old, 1859; Essays Political, 
Social and Religious, 1874-1900; 
Human Catholicism, 1876, 1S77; 
Religion of Humanity, 1878, 1879, 
1881, 1882, p. 190. 

Courtney, William Leonard. The 
Metaphysics of John Stuart Mill, 
1879; Studies in Philosophy, 1882; 
Constructive Ethics, 1886; Life of 
J. S. Mill, 1889. p. 297. 

Creative Intelligence. By John 
Dewey, Addison W. Moore, George 
H. Mead, Boyd H. Bode, Henry 
W. Stuart, James H. Tufts, Hor- 
ace M. Kallen. 1917. p. 407. 

Creighton, James Edwin. An Intro- 
ductory Logic, 1898, (4th ed. 
1920). p. 298. 

Darwin, Charles R., (1809-1882). 
Origin of Species, 1859, (6th ed. 
1872) ; Descent of Man, 1871, (2nd 
ed. 1874). p. 131. 

Dewey, John. Psychology, 1887; 
Leibniz' New Essays Concerning 
the Human Understanding, 1888; 
Outline of a Critical Theory of 
Ethics, 1891 ; The School and So- 
ciety, 1899; Studies in Logical The- 
ory, 1903; Ethics (with J. H. 
Tufts), 1908; How We Think, 
1910; The Influence of Darwin on 
Philosophy, 1910; German Philoso- 
phy and Politics, 1915; Essays in 
Experimental Logic, 1916; De- 
mocracy and Education, 1916; 
The Need for a Recovery of Phi- 
losophy (in Creative Intelligence), 
191 7; Reconstruction in Philoso- 
phy, 1920; Human Nature and 
Conduct, 1922. pp. 365, 388. 

Draper, John William, (1811-1882). 
History of the Intellectual Develop- 
ment of Europe, 1862. p. 131. 

Drummond, Henry, (1851-1897). 
Natural Law in the Spiritual 
World, 1883; Ascent of Man, 
1894. p. 200. 



Eliot, George, (1819-1880). p. 190. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, (1803-1882). 
pp. 213, 214. 

Essays and Reviews. By Frederick 
Temple, Rowland Williams, Baden 
Powell, H. B. Wilson, C. W. Good- 
win, Mark Pattison, Benjamin 
Jowett. i860, p. 124. 

Essays in Critical Realism. By Dur- 
ant Drake, Arthur O. Lovejoy, 
James B. Pratt, Arthur K. Rogers, 
George Santayana, Roy Wood Sel- 
lers, Charles A. Strong. 1920. p. 
340- 

Fawcett, Edward Douglas. The Rid- 
dle of the Universe, 1893; The In- 
dividual and Reality, 1909; The 
World as Imagination, 1916; Di- 
vine Imagining, 192 1. p. 407. 

Ferrier, James Frederick, (1808- 
1864). The Institutes of Meta- 
physic, 1854; Scottish Philosophy, 
1856; Lectures on Greek Philoso- 
phy and other Philosophical Re- 
mains, i865. pp. 40, 42. 

Fiske, John, (1842-1901). Outlines 

* of Cosmic Philosophy, 1874; The 
Unseen World, 1876; Darwinism 
and other Essays, 1879; The Des- 
tiny of Man, 1884; The Idea of 
God, 1885; Through Nature to 
God, 1899; Life Everlasting, 1901. 
p. 198. 

Flint, Robert, (1838-1901). The Phi- 
losophy of History in France and 
Germany, 1874, (new ed. 1893) ; 
Theism, 1877, (loth ed. 1902); 
Anti-Theistic Theories, 1879; Vico, 
1884; Agnosticism, 1903; Philoso- 
phy as Scientia Scientiarum, 1904. 
p. 40. 

Eraser, Alexander Campbell, (1819- 
1914). Essays in Philosophy, 
1856; Rational Philosophy in His- 
tory and in System, 1858; The 
Works of George Berkeley edited, 
1871, (new ed. 1901); Selections 
from Berkeley, 1874, (6th ed. 
1910) ; Berkeley, 1881 ; Locke, 
1890; An Essay Concerning Human 
Understanding by John Locke, ed- 



Index 



457 



ited, 1894; The Philosophy of The- 
ism, 189S-6; Thomas Reid, 1898; 
Biographia Philosophica, 1904; 
Berkeley and Spiritual Realism, 
1908. p. 319. 

Froude, James Anthony, (1818- 
1894). The Nemesis of Faith, 
1849. p. 125. 

Froude, Richard Hurrell, (1803- 
1836). Remains, 1837. p. 100. 

Fuller, Margaret, (1810-1850). p. 
214. 

Fullerton, George Stuart. The Con- 
ception of the Infinite, 1887; A 
Plain Argument for God, 1889; 
The Philosophy of Spinoza, 1891, 
(2nd ed. 1894) ; A System of Met- 
aphysics, 1904; Introduction to 
Philosophy, 1906; The World We 
Live In, 191 2. p. 343. 

Galloway, George. The Principles 
of Religious Development, 1909; 
The Philosophy of Religion, 1914. 

P- 324. 

Gibson, William Ralph Boyce. The 
Problem of Freedom in Its Re- 
lation to Psychology (in Personal 
Idealism) , 1902 ; Rudolph Eucken's 
Philosophy of Life, 1906, (3rd ed. 
1 91 2) ; The Problem of Logic, 1908; 
God With Us, 1909. p. 323. 

Godwin, William, (1756-1836). p. i. 

Green, Thomas Hill, (1836-1882). 
Introduction to Edition of Hume's 
Treatise, 1874-S; Prolegomena to 
Ethics, 1883; Works, 1885-8. pp. 
220, 250, 323. 

G;-ote, George, (1794-1871). Plato 
and other Companions of Socra- 
tes, 1865-70; Review of the work 
entitled Examination of Sir Wil- 
liam Hamilton's Philosophy, 
1868; Aristotle, 1872; Minor 
Works, 1873 ; Fragments on Ethi- 
cal Subjects, 1876. p. 86. 

Grote, John, (1813-1866). Explora- 
tio Philosophica, Pt. I, 1865, Pt. 
II, 1900; An Examination of the 
Utilitarian Philosophy, 1870 ; A 
Treatise on the Moral Ideals, 1876. 
P- 323- 



Haldane, Richard Burdon. The Re- 
lation of Philosophy to Science (in 
Essays in Philosophical Criticism), 
1883; The Pathway to Reality, 
1903, 1904; The Reign of Rela- 
tivity, 1921. p. 297. 

Hamilton, Sir William, (1788-1855). 
The Works of Thomas Reid edited, 
1846, (3rd ed. 1852) ; Discussions 
on Philosophy and Literature, Ed- 
ucation and University Reform, 
1852 ; Lectures on Metaphysics 
and Logic, 1858-60. pp. 9, 16, 37, 
38, 39, 43. 138. 

Hampden, Renn Dickson, (1793- 
1868). An Essay on the Philo- 
sophical Evidence of Christianity, 
1827; The Scholastic Philosophy 
considered in its relation to 
Christian Theology, 1833; A 
Course of Lectures introductory to 
the Study of Moral Philosophy, 
1835. P- 97. 

Plarper, Thomas N., (1821-1893). 
The Metaphysics of the School, 
1879-81. p. 341. 

Harris, William T., (1835-1909). 
Hegel's First Principle, 1869; 
Hegel's Doctrine of Reflection, 
1881 ; Philosophy in Outline, 1884; 
Hegel's Logic, 1890. p. 298. 

Harrison, Frederic. Meaning of His- 
tory, 1862, (new ed. 1894) ; Order 
and Progress, 1875; Tennyson, 
Ruskin, Mill and Others, 1899; 
Memories and Thoughts, 1906; 
Creed of a Layman, 1907; Phi- 
losophy of Common Sense, 1907; 
Realities and Ideals, 1908; Auto- 
biographic Memoirs, 1911; Posi- 
tive Evolution of Religion, 191 2. 
p. 191. 

Hartley, David, (1732-1813). pp. 2, 
87, 114. 

Herschel, Sir John F. W., (1792- 
1871). Discourse on the Study of 
Natural Philosophy, 1830. p. 77. 

Hicks, George Dawes, p. 428. 

Hinton, James, (1822-1875). Man 
and His Dwelling Place, 1859; Life 
in Nature, 1862 ; The Mystery of 
Pain, 1866; Chapters on the Art 



458 



Index 



of Thinking and Other Essays, 
1879; Philosophy and ReUgion, 
1881 ; The Law-breaker and the 
Coming of the Law, 1884. p. 327. 

Hobhouse, Leonard Trelawney. The 
Theory of Knowledge, 1896; Mind 
in Evolution, 1901, (2nd ed. 191S) ; 
Morals in Evolution, 1906, (2nd 
ed. 1915) ; Development and Pur- 
pose, 1913 ; The Metaphysical 
Theory of the State, 1918; The 
Rational Good, 192 1. p. 348. 

Hocking, William Ernest. The 
Meaning of God in Human Experi- 
ence, 1912 ; Human Nature and Its 
Remaking, 1918. p. 304. 

Hodgson, Shadworth HoUway, (1832- 
1912). Time and Space, 1865; 
The Theory of Practice, 1870; The 
Philosophy of Reflection, 1878; 
The Metaphysic of Experience, 
1898. p. 343. 

Hoemle, R. F. Alfred. Studies in 
Contemporary Metaphysics, 1920. 
p. 298. 

Holt, Edward Bissell. The Place of 
Illusory Experience in a Realistic 
World (in The New Realism), 
1912 ; The Concept of Conscious- 
ness, 1914; The Freudian Wish, 
191S. p. 446. 

Howison, George H., (1834-1916). 
The Conception of God (with 
others), 1897; The Limits of 
Evolution, 1 901, (2nd ed. 1904). 

p. 303- 
Huxley, Thomas Henry, (1825- 
1895). Man's Place in Nature, 
1863 ; Lay Sermons, Addresses and 
Reviews, 1870; Critiques and Ad- 
dresses, 1873 ; Hume, 1878 ; Sci- 
ence and Culture, 1881 ; Essays on 
Some Controverted Questions, 
1892 ; Evolution and Ethics, 1893 ; 
Collected Essays, 9 vols. 1893-4. 
p. 174. 

Jacks, Lawrence P. The Alchemy of 
Thought, 1911. p. 451. 

James, William, (1842-1910). Prin- 
ciples of Psychology, 1890; Psy- 
chology, Briefer Course, 1892 ; 



The Will to Believe, 1897; Human 
Immortality, 1898; Talks on Psy- 
chology to Teachers, 1899; Varie- 
ties of Religious Experience, 1902; 
Pragmatism, 1907; A Pluralistic 
Universe, 1909; The Meaning of 
Truth, 1909; Some Problems of 
Philosophy, 1911; Memories and 
Studies, 1911; Essays in Radical 
Empiricism, 191 2; Essays and Re- 
views, 1921. pp. 360, 368, 451. 

Jeffrey, Francis, (1773-1850). p. 
32. 

Jevons, William Stanley, (1835- 
1882). The Substitution of Simi- 
lars, 1869; Pure Logic, 1871; The 
Principles of Science, 1874, (2nd 
ed. 1877) ; Studies in Deductive 
Logic, 1880; Pure Logic and Other 
Minor Works, 1890. p. 329. 

Joachim, Harold H. A Study of 
the Ethics of Spinoza, 1901 ; The 
Nature of Truth, 1906. p. 299. 

Joad, Cyril E. M. Essays in Com- 
mon Sense Philosophy, 1919; Com- 
mon Sense Ethics, 1921. p. 428. 
Jones, Henry. The Social Organism 
(in Essays in Philosophical Criti- 
cism), 1883; Browning as a Phi- 
losophical and Religious Teacher; 
1891 ; The Philosophy of Lotze. 
1 89s; Idealism as a Practical 
Creed, 1909; The Working Faith of 
the Social Reformer, 1910; The 
Principles of Citizenship, 1919. p. 
297. 

Jowett, Benjamin, (1817-1893). St. 
Paul's Epistles to the Thessalo- 
nians, Galatians and Romans, 1855 ; 

On the Interpretation of Scripture 
(in Essays and Reviews), i860; 
Translation of Plato's Dialogues, 
1871, (3rd ed. 1892). pp. 122, 124. 

Joyce, Howard. Principles of Logic, 
ieo8, (2nd ed. 1916). p. 341. 

Kallen, Horace Meyer. William 
James and Henri Bergson, 1914; 
Value and Existence in Philosophy; 
Art, and Religion (in Creative In- 
telligence), 1917. p. 407. 

Keble, John, (1792-1866). p. 100. 



Index 



459 



Kidd, Benjamin. Social Evolution, 
1894 ; Principles of Western Civ- 
ilization, 1*902. p. 201. 

Kingsley, Charles, (1819-1875). p. 
120. 

Ladd, George Trumbull, (1822-1921). 
Elements of Physiological Psycho- 
logy, 1887, (new ed. 191 7) ; In- 
troduotion to Philosophy, 1890; 
Psychology, 1894; Philosophy of 
Mind, 189s ; Philosophy of Knowl- 
edge, 1897; Outlines of Descrip- 
tive Psychology, 1898; A Theory 
of Reality, 1899; Philosophy of 
Conduct, 1902 ; Philosophy of Re- 
ligion, 1905; Knowledge, Life and 
Reality, 1909; What Can I Know, 
1914; What May I Hope, 1915; 
What Ought I to Do, 1915; What 
Should I Believe, 1915. p. 324. 

Laird, John. Problems of the Self, 
1917; A Study in Realism, 1920. 
p. 428. 

Laurie, Simon SomerviUe, (1829- 
1909). On the Philosophy of Eth- 
ics, 1866; Notes on Certain Brit- 
ish Theories of Morals, 1868; 
Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta, 

1884, (new ed. 1889) ; Ethica, 

1885, (2nd ed. 1891) ; Synthetica, 
1906. pp. 307, 313. 

Le Conte, Joseph, (1823-1901). Re- 
ligion and Science, 1874; Evolu- 
tion and Its Relation to Religious 
Thought, 1888, (2nd ed. 1897); 
The Conception of God (with 
others), 1897, p. 199. 

Lewes, George Henry, (1817-1878). 
The Biographical History of Phi- 
losophy, 1845-6, (new ed. 1880) ; 
Comte's Philosophy of the Positive 
Sciences, 1853; Aristotle, 1864; 
Problems of Life and Mind, 1874- 
5, 1877, 1879. p. 167. 

Lindsay, James. Recent Advances in 
Theistic Fhiloaophy of Religion, 
1897 ; Studies in European Philoso- 
phy, 1909; The Fundamental Prob- 
lems of Metaphysics, 1910; A Phi- 
losophical System of Theistic 
Idealism, 191 7. p. 324. 



Lowndes, Richard, (?). Introduc- 
tion to the Philosophy of Primary 
Beliefs, 1865. p. 38. 

Macaulay, Thomas B., (1800-1859). 

P- 34. 

McCosh, James, (1811-1894). Me- 
thod of Divine Government, 1850; 
The Intuitions of the Mind, i860; 
An Examination of Mr. J. S. 
Mill's Philosophy, 1866; Philosoph- 
ical Papers, 1868; The Laws of Dis- 
cursive Thought, 1870; Christianity 
and Positivism, 1871 ; The Scottish 
Philosophy, 1875; The Develop- 
ment Hypothesis: Is it Sufficientj 
1876; The Emotions, 1880; De- 
velopment: What It Can and What 
It Cannot Do, 1884; Psychology, 
1886, 1887; ReaHstic Philosophy 
Defended, 1887; First and Funda- 
mental Truths, 1889. p. 39. 

McDougall, William. An Introduc- 
tion to Social Psychology, 1908; 
Body and Mind, 191 1; Psychology 
as the Study of Behaviour, 191 2; 
The Group Mind, 1920. p. 335. 

Mackenzie, John Stuart. An Intro- 
duction to Social Philosophy, 
1890; A Manual of Ethics, 1893, 
(4th ed. 1 901) ; Outlines of Meta- 
physics, 1902 ; Lectures on Hu- 
manism, 1907; Elements of Con- 
structive Philosophy, 191 7; Out- 
lines of Social Philosophy, 1918. 
p. 297. 

Macintosh, Douglas Clyde. The 
Problem of Knowledge, 1915; The- 
ology as an Empirical Science, 
1919. p. 450. 

Mackintosh, Sir James, (1765-1832). 
Vindiciae Gallicae, 1791; Dis- 
course on the Study of the Law 
of Nature and Nations, 1799; Dis- 
sertation on the Progress of Ethi- 
cal Philosophy, 1830; Miscellan- 
eous Works, 1846. p. 34. 

McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis. 
Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, 
1896; Studies in Hegelian Cosmo- 
logy, 1901 ; Some Dogmas of Re- 
ligion, 1906; A Commentary on 



460 



Index 



Hegel's Logic, 1910; The Nature 
of Existence, 192 1. p. 300. 

Maher, Michael. Psychology, 1891, 
(5th ed. 1902). p. 341. 

Mallock, WiUiam Hurrell. The New 
Republic, 1877; Is Life Worth Liv- 
ing, 1879; Religion as a Credible 
Doctrine, 1902 ; The Reconstruc- 
tion of Religious Belief, 1905. p. 
322. 

Malthus, Thomas Robert, (1766- 
1834). An Essay on the Principle 
of Population, 1798, (2nd ed. 
2803) ; Principles of Political 
Economy, 1820; Summary View of 
the Principle of Population, 1830. 
pp. 69, 70. 

Mansel, Henry Longueville, (1820- 
1871). Prolegomena Logica, 1851; 
The Limits of Religious Thought 
Examined, 1858; Metaphysics, 
i860; Philosophy of the Condi- 
tioned, 1866; Letters, Lectures and 
Reviews, 1873. p. 30. 

Martineau, Harriet, (1802-1876). 
Letters on the Laws of Man's Na- 
ture and Development (with H. 
G. Atkinson), 1851; The Positive 
Philosophy of Auguste Comte 
freely translated and condensed, 
1853; Autobiography, 1877. p. 
129. 

Martineau, James, (1805-1900). The 
Rationale of Religious Inquiry, 
1836; Essays Philosophical and 
Theological, 1868; Religion as Af- 
fected by Modern Materialism, 
1874; Modern Materialism, 1876; 
Ideal Substitutes for God Consid- 
ered, 1879; The Relation Between 
Ethics and Religion, 1881 ; A 
Study of Spinoza, 1882 ; Types of 
Ethical Theory, 1885; A Study of 
Religion, 1888; The Seat of Au- 
thority in Religion, 1890; Essays, 
Reviews and Addresses, 1890-1. p. 
40. 

Marvin, Walter T. Introduction to 
Systematic Philosophy, 1903 ; The 
Emancipation of Metaphysics from 
Epistemology (in The New Real- 
fem), 1912; A First Book in Meta- 



physics, 1912; The History of 
European Philosophy, 191 7. p. 448. 

Maudsley, Henry. Mind and Body, 
1870; Pathology of Mind, 1879; 
Body and Will, 1883; Natural 
Causes and Supernatual Seemings, 
1886; Life in Mind and Conduct, 
1902. p. 185. 

Maurice, John Frederick Denison, 
(1805-1872). Theological Essays, 
1853; The Conscience, 1868; Lec- 
tures on Social Morality, 1870; 
Moral and Metaphysical Philoso- 
phy, 1871-2. p. 116. 

Meredith, George, (1828-1909). p. 

191. 

Mill, James, (1773-1836), Ele- 
ments of Political Economy, 1821; 
Essays on Government, Jurispru- 
dence — written for the Supplement 
to the Encycl. Brit, (privately 
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Phenomena of the Human Mind, 
1829, (new ed. by J. S. Mill, 
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Mill, John Stuart, (1806-1873). A 
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Thoughts on Parliamentary Re- 
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sertations and Discussions, 1859, 
1867, 1875; Considerations on Rep- 
resentative Government, 1861 ; 
Utilitarianism, 1863; Examination 
of Sir William Hamilton's Philoso- 
phy, 1865 ; Auguste Comte and 
Positivism, 1865; The Works of 
James Mill edited, 1869; On the 
Subjection of Women, 1869; Auto- 
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Religion, 1874; Letters, 1910. pp. 
37, 63, 64, 88, 128, 190. 

Mivart, St. George Jackson, (1827- 
1900). Contemporary Evolution, 
1876; Lessons from Nature, 1876; 
Nature and Thought, 1882 ; A Phi- 
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Index 



461 



1892; The Helpful Science, 1895; 
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~«- Moore, George Edward. Principia 
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Morell, John Daniel, (1816-1891). 
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462 



Index 



Realism), 1912 ; Present Philosophi- 
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F. C. S. Schiller, W. R. B. Gibson, 

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Powell, Baden, (1796-1860). The 
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Rashdall, Hastings. Doctrine and 
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Reade, William Winwood, (1838- 
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Romanes, George John, (1848-1894). 
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1878; Animal Intelligence, 1881; 
Mental Evolution in Animals, 1883; 
Mental Evolution in Man, 1888; 
Darwin and After Darwin, 1892 ; 
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The Spirit of Modem Philosophy, 
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1897; Studies of Good and Evil, 
1898; The World and the Individ- 
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Psychology, 1903 ; Herbert Spen- 
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Index 



463 



losophy of Leibniz, 1900; The 
Principles of Mathematics, 1903; 
Philosophical Essays, 1910; Prin- 
cipia Mathematica (with A. N. 
Whitehead), 1910-13; The Prob- 
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Santayana, George. The Sense of 
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Schiller, Ferdinand Canning Scott. 
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Sedgwick, Adam, (1785-1873). Dis- 
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Seeley, John Robert, (1834-1895). 
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Sellers, Roy Wood. Critical Realism, 
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Seth Pringle-Pattison, Andrew. Phi- 
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Place in the Cosmos, 1897, (2nd 



ed. 1907) ; The Philosophical Radi- 
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Sheldon, Wilmon Henry. The Strife 
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Sidgwick, Henry, (1838-1899). The 
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341- 

Simcox, Edith, (1844-?). Natural 
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Sorley, WilUam Ritchie. The His- 
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ciology, 1876-96 ; Principles of 
Ethics, 1879-93; The Man vs. the 
State, 1884; The Factors of Or- 
ganic Evolution, 1887; The In- 
adequacy of Natural Selection, 



464 



Index 



1893; A Rejoinder, to Professor 
Weismann, 1893 ; Weismannism 
Once More, 1894; Various Frag- 
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Facts and Comments, igcri ; Auto- 
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Political Philosophy Since the Re- 
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182 1 ; The Philosophy of the Ac- 
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Stirling, James Hutchison, (1820- 
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Studies in Logical Theory. By 
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Sturt, Henry Cecil. Art and Per- 
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Taylor, Alfred Edward. The Prob- 
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Tyndall, John, (1820-1893). Frag- 
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Ward, James. Psychology (in En- 
cycl. Brit. 9th 'ed.), 1886; Na- 



Index 



465 



turalism and Agnosticism, 1899, 
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Watson, John. Kant and His Eng- 
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Hedonistic Theories from Aristip- 
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Webb, Clement C. J. Problems in 
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Barker, Ernest. Greek Political The- 
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Bonar, James. Philosophy and Po- 
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Boole, George. The Mathematical 
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Burnet, John. Early Greek Philoso- 
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Cunningham, G. Watts. A Study 
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De Morgan, Augustus. Essay on 
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Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes. The 
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466 



Index 



A Modern Symposium, 190S ; Jus- 
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Duff, Robert A. Spinoza's Political 
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Fite, Warner. Individualism, 191 1. 

Fowler, Thomas. Elements of De- 
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Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius, 
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Gibson, James. Locke's Theory of 
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Gurney, Edmund. The Power of 
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Inge, William R. The Philosophy of 
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Keynes, John N. Formal Logic, 



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Lewis, George Cornewall. An Essay 
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Macmillan, R. A. C. The Crowning 
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Masson, David. Recent British Phi- 
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Max Muller, Friedrich. Science of 
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Merz, John T. History of European 
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Morgan, C. Lloyd. Introduction to 

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Morley, John. Voltaire, 1871 ; Rous- 
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Diderot and the Encyclopedists, 

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Owen, John. Evenings with the 
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Pater, Walter. Marius the Epicurean, 
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Podmore, Frank. Modern Spiritual- 
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Pollock, Frederick. Spinoza: his Life 
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Seth, James. A Study of Ethical 
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Shand, Alexander F. The Founda- 
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Sidgwick, Alfred. Fallacies, 1883; 
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Smith, Norman Kemp. Studies in 
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Smith, William Henry. Thorndale, 
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Stanley, Hiram M. Evolutionary 
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467 



Stewart, John A. The Myths of 

Plato, 1905; Plato's Doctrine of 

Ideas, 1909. 
Sully, James. Pessimism, 1877; The 

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Thilly, Frank. A History of Philoso- 
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Titchener, Edward Bradford. Out- 
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Tulloch, John. Rational Theology 
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Venn, John. Logic of Chance, 1866, 
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Watson, John B. Behavior, 1914; 
Psychology from the Standpoint of 
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Whitehead, Alfred N. An Inquiry 
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Whittaker, Thomas. The Neo-PIat- 
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